Bush's Cedar Revolution Collapses in Yet Another Policy Failure
The assassination of Lebanese cabinet minister Pierre Gemayel on Tuesday has thrown that country further into yet more turmoil.
The crisis is a further testament to the bankruptcy of George W. Bush's Middle East policy. Under the dishonest rhetoric of 'democratization,' what Bush has really been about is creating pro-American winners and anti-American losers in Afghanistan, Iraq, Palestine and Lebanon. Bush's vision is not democratic because he always installs a tyranny of the majority. The vanquished are to be crushed and ridiculed, the victors to exult in their triumph. It is like a Leni Riefenstahl film.
The problem is that when you crush the Pushtuns of Afghanistan, who traditionally ruled the country, they have means of hitting back (ask the Canadian troops in Qandahar). When you crush the Sunni Arabs of Iraq, who had traditionally ruled Iraq, they have ways of organizing a guerrilla movement and acting as spoilers of Bush's new Kurdish-Shiite axis in Baghdad. When you crush Hamas even after they won the elections in early 2006, they have means of continuing to struggle.
In Lebanon, Bush egged on the pro-Hariri movement against the Syrians and their allies. Then he egged on Israel to bomb the Shiites of southern Lebanon (and, mysteriously, the rest of Lebanon, too). So he tried to create the March 14th alliance around Hariri as the winners who take all in Lebanon.
So obviously there will be trouble about this. Everything Bush touches turns to ashes, bombings, assassinations. He doesn't know how to compromise and he doesn't know how to influence his neo-colonial possessions so that they can compromise.
Lebanon for the past two years has been caught between several outside forces. The Hariris represent Saudi interests. Hizbullah and Amal, the Shiite parties, are aligned with Syria. The Gemayels have an old, longstanding behind the scenes alliance with Israel and the United States.
As I read the record, Syria provoked the initial crisis in fall, 2004, by overplaying its hand and making the Lebanese accept its choice for president, Gen. Emile Lahoud, for a further 3-year term. PM Rafiq al-Hariri resigned over this heavy-handed interference and looked set to challenge Damascus in the spring, 2005 elections. He was then assassinated in February, 2005. The assassin was himself a Sunni fundamentalist, but the operation may have been encouraged by Syrian or pro-Syrian actors.
The assassination of Hariri touched off a mass protest demanding that Syrian troops finally leave Lebanon (a peacekeeping force came in in 1976 with a US green light, during the civil war). The Syrians were supported by the Shiite Hizbullah, which staged demonstrations nearly as big as those of the pro-Hariri forces. Hariri was a Sunni, but the coalition put together after his death included Christians and Druze, as well.
Syria did withdraw. At that point, Lebanese politics became less polarized, and elections produced a national unity government that Hizbullah also joined.
But then in summer of 2006, Israel launched its long-planned war on little Lebanon, wreaking vast destruction on south Lebanon and on the southern slums of Beirut where Hizbullah was based. Israeli policy was in part to attempt to divide and conquer the Lebanese by making the reform government of Fuad Seniora attempt to disarm Hizbullah, which maintains a small paramilitary force of 3,000 to 5,000. The Lebanese government is too weak to take on Hizbullah, but members of the March 14th reform movement did lay the blame for the war at its feet.
As a result, Hizbullah has pulled out of the government. With Gemayel's assassination, the government will fall if it loses even one more cabinet minister. Worse, the society has now been economically devastated by Israeli bombing raids and is increasingly polarized. The Olmert government's plan for the second Lebanese civil war seems increasingly plausible. Syria has stupidly played into Israel's hands in this regard. The Lebanese themselves are in danger of once again allowing themselves to be used as proxies by people like Bush and Asad and Olmert. The positive achievements of the national unity government of summer-fall 2005 have been undone. Lebanon is on the brink.
Can the Middle East withstand another unconventional war, alongside those in Iraq, Palestine and Afghanistan, without unravelling altogether? And if it unravels, will it still produce petroleum for US automobiles? Will Israel be held harmless?
Stay tuned.
posted by Juan Cole @ 11/22/2006 12:38:00 AM
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13 Comments:
Refashioning the Middle East into a more democratic structure was the most ambitious and visionary aspect of the neo-conservative agenda, and with its collapse on all fronts a diagnosis is in order.
I don't think Bush's failures can be attributed to one single cause. At an abstract level Wolfowitz was surely right that the democratization of the middle east would have long term positive ramifications for the USA and those living in the middle east. There is a serious question, though, about whether such a monolithic change could be achieved at the policy level in such a direct way and in short period of time at the hands of a disliked foreign power. Fomenting democracy in Iraq through an illegal invasion and cynical occupation was as half baked in 2003 as it sounds now, and I take the rejection of this noble vision by Perle and Rumsfeld at face value. Certainly an utterly incompetent Bush administration that put people in the field based on a Roe v Wade litmus test contributed to the disaster and destined the experiment's failure in short order. One also has to point to the contribution of Cheney, whose oil buddies and Plan for the New American century eroded the US credibility for the democracy project leaving it dead on arrival even before it got started. Bush's recent babblings in South Asia, echoed by Rice, suggests that the White House bubble was never seriously threatened by any serious sense of history. Truly, the denial of Vietnam was elevated into a mantra that enabled them to recycle the fiasco. Finally, you get the sense that Bush, for all his talk of democracy. is at the heart a champion of freedom less in a Thomas Paine than in the more limited Eliot Abrahms sense of emphasizing open markets to US corporate interests rather than concerning himself with the actual living conditions of people outside of his fat cat inner circle. No doubt historians will have a treasure trove of material for writing their obituaries of Bush, but that might be premature because the final chapter of the debacle has not yet been written.
I have likened Iraq to Bush's quag-pyre. In imperiously seeking to excise his father's failure, junior has in a very oedipal way immolated himself on the idol of his father's wisdom. Unfortunately for the rest of us, junior has laid so much waste wood on the forest floor, from Lebanon to Pakistan, that a conflageration is now all but inevitable. Who knows when the spark will come, or in what form, but a careful observer can be sure that this fire will consume not only Bush and neo-conservatism, but that it will spill over and track through all the rivulets and fissures of the volatile middle east. Perhaps in this way the Middle East will be remade, but my guess is that it will look a lot more like the Taliban's Afghanistan and the Mullah's Iran than democratic Poland.
Perhaps more fundamentally, the idealism
Hopefully the one good thing to come out of Iraq will be that
In the 2000 campaign, Bush declared himself uninterested in nation building. Truth in advertising!
“……..The crisis is a further testament to the bankruptcy of George W. Bush's Middle East policy. Under the dishonest rhetoric of 'democratization,'………”
No doubt it was deceptively and dishonestly inspired, composed and promoted. But doubtful Bush has anything to do with that imspiration and composition, he is just the presenter. Would be interesting to expose the loosers behind its deceptive and dishonest composition. Obviously they think Arabs are still like the day just came out of the Ottoman Empire.
Juan, you say "The Olmert government's plan for the second Lebanese civil war seems increasingly plausible. Syria has stupidly played into Israel's hands in this regard. The Lebanese themselves are in danger of once again allowing themselves to be used as proxies by people like Bush and Asad and Olmert."
Might it not be Syria playing stupid but Israel playing clever?
Have the Pashtuns really been crushed? One of the main issues in the country today is that Karzai has installed Pashtuns almost everywhere, edging out the old Northern Alliance people and the Tajiks, Uzbeks, etc. who were tied to them. This was one cause of the riots last may, in which protestors carried posters of Ahmad Shah Massoud.
What's more, while disarming warlords, they're now making an exception for the south on the grounds they need to fight the Taliban. Aside from whether that's an act of desperation, it would seem to send a bad signal to the non-Pashtuns who are about to be at a military advantage.
Finally, don't forget the current loya jirga business, and the fact Afghanistan has been playing the nationalist card and talking about Pashtun unification on a regular basis.
The problem in Afghanistan is corruption and ineffective government, or perhaps the belief it should have a strong central government partially dedicated to the control of Western values.
AP provides us with a huge holiday whopper by H.W. Bush: "My son is an honest man." http://www.commondreams.org/headlines06/1122-08.htm
Wow!! Imagine what he'd be like if he was dishonest!!
At one point, he opined that a questioner was ignorant and needed to go back to school.
The elder Bush is responsible for war crimes related to his illegal invasion of Panama and its thousands of deaths, among others.
Tomorrow or whenever it is you have your Thanksgiving feast, please toast the Iraqi people and pray they have the strength to outlast our Imperial crimes and become whole once again after our well deserved departure; and then in a show of support for our troops, put your glasses together for Impeachment As Soon As Possible.
re At 4:25 PM, Bruce Mainzer said...
Okay Prof. Cole, I do agree that Israel was waiting for the opportunity to go to war with Hizbullah, but c'mon... Israel did not launch the war, Hizbullah did by crossing over the border, and killing and kidnapping Israeli soldiers. A little balance in your recent historical review is clearly needed here!
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There is substantial evidence that Bush and Israel were looking for a reason to go to war and took the opportunity of a border incident to do so. It was unfortunate there were no Polish uniforms available
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gleiwitz_incident
If kidnapping were a casus belli, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Casus_belli
then Argentina would have some issues http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eichmann#Capture
Despite the byzantine nature of ME politics, its always helpful to ask "Cui bono?"
From the murder of Hariri to Gemayel, and despite Hizbullah's post war standing, neither they nor Syria have benefitted from those calculated murders. Expelled and vilified, Syria could deter neither Hizbullah nor Israel. The despicable attack on Lebanon followed, and if you think that was cobbled up the day of, I have some swamp, er, land, I'd like to sell you.
As soon as there's talk of talking to the locals, say, Syria about local affairs, presto, Gemayel is precisely murdered by 2 gunmen rather than the usual imprecise tool - a bomb . Hardly calculated, whatever the chattering classes note about electoral politics, to benefit Syria or Hizbullah at a time when its apparent that Israel and Bush have much unfinished ontological business to wage. Rather, a call to the Street for demonstrations against Syria and Hizbullah, along with no more talk of talking to Syria thank you very much, about anything - Iraq, Iran, Lebanon, Golan - Nyet!
A tocsin of divisiveness in the new front of the American/Israeli wars against all ME comers?
All I do is ask that questions be asked above the dissent-crushing roar of opprobrium that passes for ME politics in our cozy democracies
Off topic (sorry) but surely important to many IC readers:
Newly released documents show that thirteen months before the Iraq War began, the Australian Ambassador to the UN told a disgraced former chairman of the Australian Wheat Board (AWB) that the war was "inevitable". He even predicted, with uncanny accuracy, how and when the invasion would take place.
The Ambassador also said "the Australian Government would support and participate in such action", even though PM John Howard has repeatedly claimed that he remained committed to a peaceful resolution until early 2003, a full year later.
[Background: the AWB paid Saddam Hussein millions of dollars in bribes and was the single biggest transgressor of the UN oil-for-food sanctions program. The Cole Enquiry was established to investigate the bribery, and it's results are now due.]
More from The Sydney Morning Herald.
But then in summer of 2006, Israel launched its long-planned war on little Lebanon, wreaking vast destruction on south Lebanon and on the southern slums of Beirut where Hizbullah was based.
Israel wasn't the only combatant ready to fight. Hizbullah had plenty of rockets stashed all over the country side.
Let's not forget Hizbullah's cross-border raid that gave Israel the excuse to cross the border. It looks to me like Hizbullah sensed a military advantage and goaded Israel over the border.
I think the other Charles has made a post others would benefit from reading. Lebanese politics is extremely complex. The Gemayel assassination in no way really benefits Syria. It benefits people who want conflict. That could include Al Qaida, factions in Israel, Iran, Hamas, even Bush if he is as delusional as his comments about Vietnam would suggest... the list of suspects is long.
As for those who continue to think that capturing a couple of soldiers in a cross-border raid is justification for launching a bombing campaign that caused one of the world's worst oil spills, left 1 million cluster bombs waiting to maim children, and left Lebanon in ruins...
I am left speechless.
Bruce, I have articles in American media in the months before the war that show Lebanese farmers and the like who were getting killed by Israeli strikes over the border. They didn't just attack Israel for no reason. If you believe the Lebanese press, Israeli commandos were caught across the border before the original kidnapping ever took place. Did Hizbullah carry out their kidnapping for one reason, the other, or both (regardless of truth)?
As much as I enjoy Juan's analyses, this time he is barking at the wrong tree. Hezbollah and its allies didn't resign from the government because of Israel's attack; they resigned because the majority wouldn't let them block the Hariri court. The majority was willing to continue the unity government, even give the pro-Syrian minority enough cabinet seats to block any decision on the condition that the tribunal is ratified. The minority refused, and instead decided to try to topple the government with street demonstrations, boycotts and (as it turns out) assassinations. Not everything that happens in the Middle East is a result of some Machiavellian machinations of George W. Bush.
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