Here is a preview of the opening pages of my new book, The Road to Fatima Gate: The Beirut Spring, the Rise of Hezbollah, and the Iranian War Against Israel.
Introduction: The Beirut Spring
"We don't want the great Syrian prison." -- Kamal Jumblatt
"Rafik Hariri is the person who made Lebanon into a nice place from a place that had nothing nice in it." -- Lebanese schoolchild
On February 14, 2005, an unseen assassin in downtown Beirut activated the detonator on an improvised explosive device and turned former Lebanese Prime Minister Rafik Hariri's motorcade into a fireball. The blast ripped apart vehicles and ignited their gas tanks, shattered buildings in every direction, blew out the windows of the refurbished Phoenicia InterContinental Hotel, and left a crater in the street deep enough to swallow a house. The concussion wave shook foundations everywhere in the capital, and the sound echoed off the sides of the mountains.
Hariri's armor-plated Mercedes could shield him from sniper rounds and fragmentation grenades, but it could not protect him from this. His family could at least rest knowing that he died instantly. Bassel Fleihan, Lebanon's former minister of economy and trade, suffered burns on more than 95 percent of his body and would not succumb to his wounds until two months later. Twenty others, mostly bodyguards, also were killed, and more than 200 innocent bystanders were injured.
The scene was a horror. Not only was the former prime minister almost certainly dead, but the whole street was on fire and hundreds of burned and bleeding people were screaming. Acrid black smoke boiled from the vehicles, making rescue all but impossible. It was an act of war and an act of political terrorism, and almost everyone suspected at once that the Syrian government did it.
Syria all but annexed the country at the end of the Lebanese civil war fifteen years earlier, and opposition to rule from Damascus had been rising at home and abroad. Hariri wasn't exactly the front man for that movement, but he was by far the most popular Lebanese leader who had tired of Pax Syriana. Syria's strongman President Bashar al-Assad rightly saw Hariri as a threat and wrongly gambled that he could shore up his own rule by dispatching the former prime minister downtown in broad daylight.
It didn't work. Lebanon exploded in revolt the likes of which the modern Middle East had never seen. About a million people in a country of just more than four million descended on Martyrs Square in Beirut and demanded the immediate termination of Syria's military occupation and the banishment of its mukhabarat intelligence agents. Hundreds of young people set up a tent city downtown and refused to go home until the Syrian soldiers were out and free elections were formally scheduled.
The story captivated the world. It seemed the "color" revolutions that had recently toppled authoritarian regimes in the former Soviet Union--the Rose Revolution against Eduard Shevardnadze in Georgia, and the Orange Revolution against Viktor Yanukovych's electoral fraud in Ukraine--found their echo in, of all places, an Arabic-speaking country.
Bashar al-Assad and his ruthless late father, Hafez al-Assad, swore their occupation of Lebanon was a benevolent mission on the part of the forces of order. Somebody had to step in and keep the country's factions from killing each other. Most of the world accepted this for a while. Many Lebanese even accepted this at first. Lebanon had dismembered and all but destroyed itself between 1975 and 1990, and it didn't let up until Syria conquered the country, brokered the Taif Agreement, and disarmed the combatants. If Syria left, the hotheaded Lebanese might take their M16s out of their closets again.
That's what al-Assad's people said, anyway. As if right on schedule, the uprising against Syrian rule had barely even begun when a series of car bombs exploded from East Beirut to the port city of Jounieh.
I hopped a midnight flight to Beirut from Germany just after the fourth bomb went off. Never before had I flown on so empty a plane. Even my flight to New York City two weeks after al Qaeda destroyed the World Trade Center had more people on it.
Hardly anyone wanted to fly to Beirut now that Beirut was "Beirut" again. Just about everyone in the world my age or older remembered vividly when the city epitomized urban disaster zones in the 1980s. The very name of the city had made me shudder for most of my life, conjuring images of vicious communal bloodletting; airplane hijackings; smoldering embassies; suicide bombers; and hostage-takers with their AK-47s, crazed manifestos, and ski masks.
"I am going to die here," one of my colleagues said to himself as his own flight prepared to land.
I stayed in a hotel on the west side of the city that was almost as empty as the plane I flew in on. Management discounted the rack rate so steeply that my stay was practically free. The only other guest on my floor was a big shot from some other place whose twitchy bodyguards staking out the hallway started every time they saw me coming.
Most high-end hotels hired security guards to search every car that pulled up for explosives. It didn't matter who you were, where you were from, or what you looked like--you could not park out front without first having your trunk and undercarriage searched by men wielding mirrors, flashlights, and rifles. I could forget about ordering a pizza. A sign taped to the elevator door in the lobby said, "Due to the security situation we no longer allow food deliveries from outside the hotel. Thank you for understanding."
It wasn't as nerve-wracking as it sounds. The streets were quieter than usual, but otherwise, life continued as normal. I couldn't help wondering, though, as I tried to sleep my first night, if the building was about to explode.
My hotel didn't explode, but I did tread a bit gingerly when I went downtown and met with the dissidents in their tent city. Who could say for sure that Syria wouldn't just open fire and kill hundreds of people as China's Deng Xiaoping did in Beijing's Tiananmen Square in 1989? The late father of the current Syrian president killed as many as tens of thousands in one weekend alone when the Muslim Brotherhood took up arms against his government. "No one is safe," activist Jad Ghostine told me. "If they will kill the prime minister, they will kill anyone."
Thomas Friedman, the veteran journalist who cut his teeth in Beirut during the war, issued a stark warning in the New York Times. "There will be no velvet revolutions in this part of the world," he wrote. "The walls of autocracy will not collapse with just one good push. As the head-chopping insurgents in Iraq, the suicide bombers in Saudi Arabia and the murderers of Mr. Hariri have all signaled: The old order in this part of the world will not go quietly into this good night. You put a flower in the barrel of their gun and they'll blow your hand and your head right off."
Beirut, as it turned out, actually did get a velvet revolution of sorts, but no one knew at the time that's what would happen. Those who knew Lebanon's history, as Friedman did better than most, had plenty of reasons to worry.
Clashes between Palestinian and Christian militias in 1975 unleashed fifteen years of sectarian warfare unprecedented in its ferocity in the Middle East since the dissolution of the Ottoman Empire. It was all the more tragic that it happened in the most liberal and democratic of the Arabic-speaking countries.
All Middle Eastern countries have religious minorities, but Lebanon is the only one without a religious majority. A little more than a third of the population is Christian, a little less than a third is Sunni Muslim, and a final third or so is Shia Muslim. Druze make up roughly 5 percent. This was Lebanon's blessing and curse. It's the most cosmopolitan place in the region when it's at peace with itself, but when it breaks down--watch out.
Its breakdown in the 1970s was just about fatal. Many in the Sunni community thrilled to Pan-Arab causes, and none so urgently as that of the Palestinians. The Sunni elite welcomed Yasser Arafat's Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) into the country to use it as a base for its war against Israel and even helped him set up his own state within a state in West Beirut. Many, if not most, Christians were furious. When the government refused to shut Arafat down, they organized militias to do it themselves.
Sporadic clashes with small arms led to serious battles with heavier weapons, and Beirut split apart into mutually hostile cantons. The so-called Green Line ran like a burning and bleeding gash southeast from downtown and cut the city in half, the mostly Christian east side squaring off against the mostly Sunni and Palestinian west.
Soon the whole country was at war with itself. Christians fought Sunnis and Druze. Palestinians fought Shias and Christians. Syria invaded, first to save the Christians from the Palestinians and later to keep the Christians down and Israel out. The Israelis barged in to get rid of Arafat. French and American troops tried to impose some kind of order. Iranian Revolutionary Guards founded Hezbollah to fight the Israelis and hunt down every Westerner they could find. Even the Soviet Union got in on the action by helping Druze leader Kamal Jumblatt slug it out with the Christians for control of the mountains.
Some militiamen even executed civilians at checkpoints for what was printed next to "religion" on their identity cards. The war wasn't religious per se. God had little or nothing to do with it. Sects in the Middle East are communities; religion just marks the boundaries. As Jews in Israel are considered Jews whether or not they're religious, every single person in Lebanon belonged to one religiously defined group or another. Atheist "Christians" fought atheist "Sunnis," and so on. Aside from the radical Islamists of Hezbollah, hardly any of the combatants cared if their enemies went to church, prayed in a mosque, or believed God existed at all. They fought over turf, and they fought over politics.
These communities even turned on themselves. Christians battled it out with other Christians for dominance in their carved-up enclaves in East Beirut and Mount Lebanon. The Shias did the same when Hezbollah fought the secular men of Amal for control of the Israeli border and the suburbs south of Beirut.
Once considered the Switzerland of the Middle East, Lebanon became the place where the Middle East fought its wars. It was not only a battleground for its own sects and their various factions, but the principal battleground in the Arab-Israeli conflict, the first battleground in the nascent Iranian-Israeli conflict, the second-largest front after the Iran-Iraq war in the ancient conflict between Sunnis and Shias, and even a minor sort of proxy war battleground in the Cold War. It could not possibly have been any more of a mess.
It is often said that Israel is tiny, but Lebanon is only half its size. It's extraordinary that such a small place--with no natural resources to fight over--became so incredibly important, but that's what happened.
Many Lebanese said their country was cursed by geography. If it were an island, or even if it bordered countries other than Israel and Syria, its history would have had a very different trajectory. The PLO would not have used it as a base to fight Israel and therefore never would have gotten into the shooting fight with the Christians that sparked the war in the first place. The Israelis hardly would have paid it any attention, and without an Israeli invasion and occupation, Iran could not have built up Hezbollah. Syria would never have invaded or occupied it.
So yes, the country was cursed by geography as well as its internal divisions. But what could you do? Lebanon was hardly unique. Bosnia-Herzegovina, Georgia, Ukraine, Israel, Cyprus, Iraq--all these countries had similar problems.
More than 150,000 people were killed in the war--a terrible number, more than 3 percent of the population. Everyone knew someone who didn't survive, and most people knew several. The country was ravaged, no part of it more than Beirut. Journalist and author Christopher Hitchens was thunderstruck by the vast devastation when he visited after the guns finally went silent.
"From the air it looked like Rotterdam at the end of the Second World War," he told me when I later met up with him there. "There wasn't a single undamaged building within a bull's roar," he added in an interview published on the website NOW Lebanon. "There was only one functioning hotel. It looked like a moonscape." He saw a solitary old man clearing rubble away with a shovel and couldn't stop thinking about him. "I was so touched by it. I was thinking, well, lots of luck. See you in fifty years."
*
"You are crazy to be here right now," the young man next to me said. "Crazy." He and I sat alone yet next to each other at the bar in a fashionable establishment on Monot Street along the old Green Line that during the war was a deathly silent no-man's-land between East and West Beirut where nothing lived except weeds and wild grass.
"You really think so?" I said.
I didn't feel crazy to be there. That feeling passed after twenty four hours. There weren't tanks in the streets. It wasn't a war zone. There were, however, far fewer people out in public than usual. Restaurants, cafés, and bars that were usually packed were more than half empty. No one had any idea what might happen next. Most thought it wise to stay home and out of the way.
Beirut had a serious case of the jitters, and I didn't have to interview anybody to know that. I heard about it constantly even while minding my own business. A taxi driver, in one of the most anguished and heartbroken voices I have ever heard in my life, told me why it was his dream to live in America. "I hate this country," he said, physically depressed and hunched over the wheel. "Christians kill each other. Muslims kill each other. Oh my God."
The young man next to me at the bar was named Claude. Obviously, then, he was a Christian. It's rude to ask a Lebanese person which sect they belong to, but names, accents, and birthplaces often give it away.
"We are getting close to the war," he said and sipped from his martini. "That's why the government is asking us all to come out and return to the nightlife. It pushes the war away."
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You can purchase The Road to Fatima Gate at Amazon.com
UPDATE: Autographed copies are no longer available. You can purchase The Road to Fatima Gate at Amazon.com
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My book The Road to Fatima Gate: The Beirut Spring, the Rise of Hezbollah, and the Iranian War Against Israel is completely finished. If you would like an autographed copy, and if you'd like to support my work, you can place an order right now and I will sign it and mail it to you personally as soon as the shipment arrives.
The book will be available in bookstores on April 5, but if you pre-order your autographed copy now you might get it sooner. And I will make five times as much money per copy if you buy it directly from me and cut the stores and the distributors out of the loop.
My publisher, Encounter Books, has done an absolutely fantastic job on both the inside and the outside. The aesthetics are perfect and I couldn't be happier. Working with Roger Kimball and his staff has been an entirely positive experience.
If you enjoy my blog and my articles you will really like this. The Road to Fatima Gate is by far the best thing I have ever written.
Here is the book's official description on the dust jacket:
The Road to Fatima Gate is a first-person narrative account of revolution, terrorism, and war during history's violent return to Lebanon after fifteen years of quiet. Michael J. Totten's version of events in one of the most volatile countries in the world's most volatile region is one part war correspondence, one part memoir, and one part road movie.
He sets up camp in a tent city built in downtown Beirut by anti-Syrian dissidents, is bullied and menaced by Hezbollah's supposedly friendly "media relations" department, crouches under fire on the Lebanese-Israeli border during the six-week war in 2006, witnesses an Israeli ground invasion from behind a line of Merkava tanks, sneaks into Hezbollah's post-war rubblescape without authorization, and is attacked in Beirut by militiamen who enforce obedience to the "resistance" at the point of a gun.
From the "Cedar Revolution" that ousted the occupying Syrian military regime in 2005, to the devastating war between Israel and Hezbollah in 2006, and to Hezbollah's violent assault on Lebanon's elected government and capital, Totten's account is both personal and comprehensive. He simplifies the bewildering complexity of the Middle East, has access to major regional players as well as to the man on the street, and personally witnesses most of the events he describes. The Road to Fatima Gate should be indispensable reading for anyone interested in the Middle East, Iran's expansionist foreign policy, the Arab-Israeli conflict, asymmetric warfare, and terrorism in the aftermath of September 11.
And here are the blurbs on the front and the back:
"Here is the book we've been waiting almost a decade for: a firsthand account, curious, subtle, clear-eyed and thus at turns critical and sympathetic, from the front lines of the Middle East where the war between obscurantism and freedom cannot help but impact U.S. interests, allies and citizens here at home--a narrative told by America's premier reporter of the Arab states, from Iraq to Lebanon." -- Lee Smith, author of The Strong Horse: Power, Politics, and the Clash of Arab Civilizations.
"I can think of only a certain number of people as having risen to the intellectual and journalistic challenges of the last few years, and Michael J. Totten is one of them." -- Paul Berman, author of Terror and Liberalism and The Flight of the Intellectuals.
"It is extremely rare to read such an accurate account of anything to which one was oneself a witness." -- Christopher Hitchens, author of God is Not Great.
"Michael J. Totten is one of a rare breed. Moving from front to front, he brings experience and context and the willingness to go where few men dare." -- Michael Yon, author of Moment of Truth in Iraq.
"The Road to Fatima Gate is a storm warning about a major change in the balance of power in the Middle East: Through its proxy Hezbollah, Iran is striving to gain control of Lebanon. That country could be dismembered, occupied or overtaken by war much as Czechoslovakia was after 1938, and every bit as fatefully. An intrepid reporter, Michael J. Totten bravely and skillfully draws on a lot of first-hand experience to explain the plight of Lebanese democratic personalities and political parties driven to defend themselves against the imposition of Iranian Islamism at gun-point. He is the right man in the right place at the right time." -- David Pryce-Jones, author of The Closed Circle: An Interpretation of the Arabs.
"Michael J. Totten, to my mind, is one of the world's most acute observers of Middle East politics. He is also an absolutely fearless reporter, both physically -- he has explored the darkest corners of Middle East extremism -- and morally. No one is as clear-eyed as Totten on the subject of Iran's repressive regime, and in The Road to Fatima Gate he explains lucidly and grippingly the paramount importance of Iran and its proxies to Israel's future, and to America's." -- Jeffrey Goldberg, author of Prisoners: A Story of Friendship and Terror and national correspondent at The Atlantic.
Iran's most repressed religious minority is also its largest. Members of the community are routinely imprisoned, frequently executed, banned from universities, and ruthlessly repressed economically. Tens of thousands have been murdered by one regime after another. The current government--the Khomeinist "Islamic Republic"--goes farther than any other by vowing to crush these people wherever they live and erase them from the face of the earth.
There are only six or seven million in the entire world, and their spiritual home is in Israel. I am not, however, referring here to the Jews, but to the Bahais.
Their world headquarters is in Israel, and they came during Ottoman times from Persian lands. The nation-state of one of the world's oldest religions now hosts the holiest site of one of the newest, and the nation where the Bahai Faith was born vows to destroy the nation where the Bahai Faith had to migrate.
The strikingly different treatments of these people by Iran and by Israel infuses the looming showdown between the Middle East's two most powerful countries with even more moral clarity than it already had.
I sought out Martin Kramer in Jerusalem because I knew he would give me an analysis well outside-the-box on Iranian nuclear weapons. He's a scholar, not a politician or pundit. And while he certainly has his opinions, he doesn't conveniently fit into anyone's ideological box.
I was not disappointed, and I don't think you will be either. What he has to say is different from anything you've read from anyone in the media, including me.
MJT: I assume you read Jeffrey Goldberg's article in The Atlantic this summer. He asked dozens of Israeli decision-makers and analysts if they think Israel will strike Iran's nuclear weapons facilities, and the concensus seems to be that the odds are greater than fifty percent that it will happen before the middle of summer in 2011. What do you think?
Martin Kramer: It's in Israel's interest to convince the world that the decision-makers are leaning in that direction. The idea is to prompt somebody else to take action, in particular the Obama administration. So there's a debate about whether or not Jeffrey has been spun.
MJT: Yes, and he mentioned that himself.
Martin Kramer: The whole purpose of spinning Jeffrey Goldberg--assuming that's what happened--was to prod the United States into taking a more forward position. Americans are taking a forward position already, but the idea here would be to multiply the effect.
But I don't know. I haven't spoken to all the people Jeffrey talked to, and there are a lot of variables that we don't know yet. The timeline is open to question. The intelligence is also being debated. So while I wouldn't put a percentage on it, plans are definitely on the table. If the Unites States doesn't act, the moment will come when a decision will have to be made. We don't know what the arguments will be or in which ways the calculations will shift between now and then. Israel has the option, though, and it's on the table. I wouldn't say the odds are greater than fifty percent, but it's a credible option.
MJT: What do you think Iran would actually do with a nuclear bomb?
Jonathan Spyer is not your typical Israeli journalist and political analyst. He has a PhD in International Relations, he fought in Lebanon during the summer war of 2006, then went back to Lebanon as a civilian on a second passport.
I can't say I felt particularly brave venturing into Hezbollah's territory along the Lebanese-Israeli border, but it takes guts for Israelis to go there. If Hezbollah caught him and figured out who he was, he would have been in serious trouble.
No one he met in Lebanon knew where he was from. Everyone thought he was British. And no one in Israel but his friends and colleagues knew he went back to Lebanon on his own. He decided, though, that he may as well "out" himself on my blog. His secret journey will soon be revealed anyway when his book comes out in November called The Transforming Fire: The Rise of the Israel-Islamist Conflict
We met in Jerusalem this month and discussed his two trips to Lebanon--with and without a passport--and the perfect Iranian storm brewing on the horizon.
MJT: So why did you go back to Lebanon?
Jonathan Spyer: Lebanon is a fascinating place, and I wanted to visit for all sorts of reasons. I especially wanted to get back to where we were during the war. There is a green valley, which I imagine you know very well, between the towns of Khiam and Marjayoun.
MJT: Yes, I know where you're talking about.
Jonathan Spyer: We were down there in that valley during the war, and our tanks got shot up. I wanted to get back there and look at it from Khiam. I hired some guides in Beirut and asked them to take me. We took the coast road down, then drove all the way across southern Lebanon to the eastern sector. And I stood in Khiam and looked down into that valley.
We got stuck there because of a cock-up. The infantry in our division were supposed to capture Khiam. There were 300 Hezbollah men there. We were operating at night. After a series of screw-ups, our column of tanks ended up heading through that valley toward Israel with 300 Hezbollah men looking down on us in the morning. So you can imagine what happened.
And to make it even more ludicrous, we weren't even moving at the right speed. The steering mechanism on one of our tanks was broken, so we had to drag it with reinforced cables. We were going about five kilometers an hour. We were hardly moving at all. And we got blown to bits by Hezbollah's missiles. Our armor is pretty good, though, so only one of our guys was killed.
An Associated Press photographer was also in Khiam at the same time, so the AP has a photograph of our tanks in flames. [Laughs.] I'm laughing because I found that photograph on a pro-Hezbollah Web site, and this tough revolutionary guy was on there boasting and saying "the people in those tanks died horrible deaths!"
I wrote back and said, "Listen. With the exception of one person who was killed, the people in those tanks all got out, hid in the fields for over an hour, and got back across the Israeli border. All of them were operational again within 48 hours."
Not long after September 11, 2001, Paul Berman wrote a masterful little book called Terror and Liberalism
He returns now with a new book called The Flight of the Intellectuals
Something terrible has happened to the intellectual class during the interim period. The killers' would-be victims have been excoriated in the press, and even, in some cases, blamed for their predicament. Berman won't stand for it. As Ron Rosenbaum put it hopefully in a recent review of his new book in Slate, "Maybe some of the previously silent will begin to speak out against the death squads rather than snark about their victims and targets."
The Flight of the Intellectuals
In 1979, a coalition of Iranian liberals, leftists, and Islamists overthrew the tyrannical Shah Reza Pahlavi--and a new regime more dangerous and brutal than the last took its place.
An alliance of liberals, leftists, and Islamists made sense at first. The Shah oppressed them all more or less equally. But the Iranian Revolution, like so many others before it, devoured its children. Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini and his Islamists emerged the strong horse in the post-revolutionary struggle for power, and they liquidated the liberals and leftists.
One young Iranian man, who now goes by the name Reza Kahlili, joined Khomeini's Revolutionary Guards right at the beginning. He quickly became disillusioned, however, when he saw young people tortured and murdered in Tehran's notorious Evin Prison. Repressing his countrymen was not what he had in mind when he signed up. Rather than quit and place himself and his family under suspicion, he contacted the CIA and agreed to work as an American agent under the code name "Wally."
"My role was to look and act the part of a devout Muslim enforcing all the new rules laid down by the mullahs," he writes in his terrific book A Time to Betray: The Astonishing Double Life of a CIA Agent Inside the Revolutionary Guards of Iran
Reza lives safely in Los Angeles now, though he hasn't stopped doing whatever he can to contribute to the downfall of his home country's repressive regime--a regime he understands better than most having spent so many difficult years pretending to serve it.
He and I spoke for an hour on the phone over the weekend.
MJT: So why did you join the Revolutionary Guards in the first place?
Reza Kahlili: It was a special time after the revolution against the Shah in 1979. Everyone was jubilant and thought democracy had finally arrived. We were promised that the clergy wouldn't interfere in the new government, that people could choose the government they liked, that we would have freedom of speech and could criticize top officials. It was a great atmosphere at the time. We could stand on the corner and talk about politics. Everybody was really happy about the direction we thought it was going to take.
It was during this time that my friend Kazem told me about the opportunity with the Revolutionary Guards. They hired me immediately after the interview. I thought they were formed to serve the people, to protect the country, to help make sure the poor participated in the new infrastructure. I was willing to teach, I was willing to work, and that's why I joined.
MJT: You had no idea Khomeini was going to take control of the country the way he did.
Reza Kahlili: I don't think anybody had any idea. Everyone was so overwhelmed. We thought the Shah would never leave the country. It was unthinkable that anyone could force his regime to collapse. Something magical had happened.
Romania's tyrant Nicolae Ceausescu ran one of Europe's most ruthlessly repressive dictatorships until 1989 when he and his wife Elena were overthrown by their captive subjects and executed on television. The country had been so thoroughly brutalized by its own government that it was still an emergency room case even years after its communist rulers were dispatched. Unlike some formerly Eastern bloc countries, its reputation still hasn't recovered entirely even though it belongs to the European Union and NATO.
"Last time I was in Romania," independent foreign correspondent Michael Yon said to me in an email, "it was terrible. It was like hell."
"The featureless plain filled with cardboard and scrap-metal squatters' settlements as awful as many I had seen in Africa, Asia, and Latin America," Robert D. Kaplan wrote in his outstanding book Eastward to Tartary: Travels in the Balkans, the Middle East, and the Caucasus
The country doesn't look anything like the Third World anymore. It would not be in the European Union if it did. I was slightly surprised, though, by how many scars from the communist era were still visible when the Ministry of Foreign Affairs invited me and three of my colleagues to visit near the end of 2009.
Some Western Europeans seemed to lose a bit of confidence in themselves and their civilization after the near-apocalyptic traumas of the two world wars, but Romanians, like others in Eastern Europe, have emerged from a third and much more recent trauma in a different emotional state. Bogdan Aurescu, Romania's Secretary of State for Strategic Affairs, spoke for most of his countrymen as he explained it.
"The level of affection," he said, "or preference for a partnership relation with the United States is high, one of the highest in Europe. The French have a preference for the Obama Administration, but Romanians don't make distinctions between a Republican administration or a Democratic administration. It's irrespective of ideological affiliation."
His assistant served hot cups of black Turkish coffee and bottles of water.
"Since it's irrespective of ideological affiliation," said my colleague Gregory Rodriguez from the Los Angeles Times, "what do you ascribe this preference to?"
"During the communist years," Aurescu said, "there was a sense of disappointment that the U.S. was not here. We felt separated from the Western culture we feel we belong to. Western culture, including American culture, was and still is a part of our identity. That was very much reflected after the Romanian Revolution 20 years ago in very strong support for both EU and NATO accession. We are culturally oriented, without any possibility of doubt or shift, towards Western democratic culture."
If you read only one book about the Middle East this year--aside from mine, of course, after it's finished--read The Strong Horse
Lee and I met in Lebanon in 2005, and have been friends ever since. We've spent I-don't-know-how-many evenings in Beirut and Jerusalem discussing Middle Eastern politics and conflict, sometimes expanding each others' knowledge and other times arguing. We don't argue so much anymore, except around the edges once in a while. I should say he won some of our arguments in the end, partly because he relocated to the Middle East before I did and was farther along on the learning curve, but he also claims I shaped some of the way he came to think about the region in that he believes the issues are largely Arab rather than Islamic per se. Whether he's right about that, or if I am, it's certainly an argument worth thinking about. Sometimes his prognosis is gloomy--the Middle East is the kind of place where it's extremely difficult, if not impossible, to remain optimistic and hopeful for long--but we both have a lot still invested in the region, including mutual friendships in several Middle Eastern countries on both sides of the front lines.
The Strong Horse
His book is not so easy to summarize, so I invited him to speak for himself and go over some of the main points.
MJT: The title of your book is The Strong Horse
Lee Smith: It comes from Osama Bin Laden's observation that when people see a strong horse and a weak horse, by nature, they will like the strong horse. I know this idea will be confused with the notion that Arabs understand only force, an idea often, and incorrectly, attributed to the Bush administration. It is useful to recall that throughout history most of mankind has "understood" force. Those lucky few who are fortunate enough to be able to live their political lives free of the fear of violence are largely concentrated in the capitals of contemporary Western Europe and along the east and west coasts of the United States, who not coincidentally happen to make up the primary audience I was writing for, so I wanted to explain that the inhabitants of the Arabic-speaking Middle East are not as fortunate as we are. To say that Lebanon is held at gunpoint by an armed gang, or that Lebanese journalists are assassinated for their work, Syrian intellectuals and Egyptian rights activists are typically thrown in prison and tortured, and regional minorities like the Shia, Druze, Alawi, Christians, Kurds and Jews have often been the target of purges and political violence all in the name of Arab nationalism, a corporatist ideology that seeks to erase communal as well as individual difference, is not to say that Arabs only understand force, but that violence is a central factor in Arab political life and it is impossible to understand the region without taking this into account.
Read the rest at MichaelTotten.com»
Journalist and author Christopher Hitchens visited my hometown of Portland, Oregon last week, and I interviewed him at Jake's Grill downtown over glasses of Johnny Walker Black Label. My old friend and sometimes traveling companion Sean LaFreniere joined us and contributed a few questions of his own. You can read Part I here.
MJT: The big story in 2010 will be Iran. We have this revolution there--I'm not afraid to call it that.
Hitchens: You're right, I think it is one.
MJT: We have Iran's terrorist proxies in Gaza and Lebanon. And we have the regime's nuclear weapons program.
Hitchens: Also, in each case, the Iranian Revolutionary Guard--the Pasdaran--is the controlling force.
MJT: Hezbollah is the Mediterranean branch of the Revolutionary Guards.
Hitchens: We have the same bunch overseas where they're not wanted, in Lebanon and even among the Palestinians, conducting assassination missions abroad, shooting down young Iranians in the streets of a major city, and controlling an illegal thermonuclear weapons program. We do have a target. All this has been accumulated under one heading.
MJT: Yes.
Hitchens: I thought that was worth pointing out. It's not "the regime" or "the theocracy." It's now very clear that the Revolutionary Guards have committed a coup in all but name--well, I name it, but it hasn't yet been named generally. They didn't rig an election. They didn't even hold one.
MJT: They never counted the votes. There's no "recount" to be done.
Hitchens: The seizure of power by a paramilitary gang that just so happens to be the guardian and the guarantor and the incubator of the internationally illegal weapons program. If that doesn't concentrate one's mind, I don't know what will.
MJT: If the Obama Administration calls you up and says, "Christopher, we need you to come in here, we need your advice." What would you tell them?
Hitchens: I would say, as I did with Saddam Hussein--albeit belatedly, I tried to avoid this conclusion--that any fight you're going to have eventually, have now. Don't wait until they're more equally matched. It doesn't make any sense at all.
The existence of theocratic regimes that have illegally acquired weapons of mass destruction, that are war with their own people, that are exporting their violence to neighboring countries, sending death squads as far away as Argentina to kill other people as well as dissident members of their own nationality--the existence of such regimes is incompatible with us. If there is going to be a confrontation, we should pick the time, not them.
We're saying, "Let's give them time to get ready. Then we'll be more justified in hitting them." That's honestly what they're saying. When we have total proof, when we can see them coming for us, we'll feel okay about resisting.
Read the rest at MichaelTotten.com
I had lunch with journalist and author Christopher Hitchens in my hometown of Portland, Oregon, this week and interviewed him over glasses of Johnny Walker Black Label downtown.
The man should need no introduction, but I'll give him one anyway. He's the author or editor of more than twenty books, a journalist, a literary critic, a world traveler, a teacher, and a polemicist who migrated rightward from the radical left and no longer fits in anyone's convenient box. Last year Forbes magazine cited him as one of the 25 most influential liberals in the U.S. media, but at the same time he's a fellow at the conservative Hoover Institution at Stanford. In 2005, Foreign Policy magazine cited him as one of the 100 most influential intellectuals in the world.
He's a regular contributor to Vanity Fair, Slate, and the Atlantic, and his most recent book, God Is Not Great, made him more famous (or, if you prefer, infamous) than ever. His best book, or perhaps I should say my favorite, is Love, Poverty, and War, a rich collection of travel pieces and essays on those three most important of topics.
Hitchens is certainly famous, and is recognized on the street a lot more often than I am. A tall and slightly disheveled man in his fifties rudely interrupted our conversation outside the bar at one point and said "I can't remember your name, but I recognize you from YouTube."
"You should read more," Hitchens said. He didn't remind the man of his name.
Not two minutes later, an attractive young woman walked up to him, squeezed his arm gently, and said "I love you."
"How often does this happen?" I said.
"This," he said and smiled at the pretty young woman, "doesn't happen nearly enough. But that," he said and gestured to the man who recognized him from YouTube and would not go away, "happens too often."
Read the rest at MichaelTotten.com
In the October 12 issue of Newsweek, Fareed Zakaria makes a case for containing rather than confronting Iran, partly because he expects "a massive outpouring of support for the Iranian regime" if its nuclear-weapons facilities are attacked by the U.S. or Israel. "This happens routinely when a country is attacked by foreign forces, no matter how unpopular the government," he writes.
As a precedent, he cites how Russians rallied to Stalin when Germany invaded in 1941. But of course Russians rallied to Stalin. No viable political opposition existed as it does today in Iran, and besides: they were attacked by the Nazis. The Germans weren't liberators. Russia was not going to be treated better by foreign totalitarians than by its own. Even the U.S. and Britain backed Stalinist Russia under those circumstances.
The people of Afghanistan, on the other hand, were euphoric when NATO demolished the Taliban regime in 2001. The Taliban has since reconstituted itself as a terrorist and insurgent militia, but its approval rating among Afghan civilians is by some reports as miserable as 6 percent. Support for the U.S. and NATO has slipped recently, but it's still telling that, according to an ABC News poll of public opinion, 58 percent still say the Taliban is the greatest threat to security, while only 8 percent say the same of the United States.
Very few Iraqis outside the relatively small Sunni community threw their support behind Saddam Hussein when President Bill Clinton bombed Iraq's weapons of mass destruction facilities in 1998 or when President George W. Bush finished off his Baath party regime once and for all in 2003. Meanwhile, the various terrorist and insurgent militias that later rose up were almost exclusively sectarian and Islamist, not Baathist.
Even the Shia of south Lebanon -- today's Hezbollah supporters -- initially hailed the Israelis as liberators in 1982 when they invaded to oust Yasir Arafat's Palestinian Liberation Organization from its state-within-a-state along the border and in West Beirut. Only later, when the Israelis did not leave as expected, did the prototype of Hezbollah begin to take shape.
Read the rest in Commentary Magazine.
