BEIRUT — Tomorrow’s by-elections have turned into a crit­i­cal test of polit­i­cal power here in Lebanon and the results will be seen as a bell­weather for the influ­ence of either the United States or the Islamic Repub­lic Iran.
Some back­ground on the elec­tion is here, in a col­umn I wrote for Spot​-on​.com. I’ll wait while you read and come back.
All done? Good. Right now, the March 14 alliance, pri­mar­ily made up of Saad Hariri’s Future Move­ment, Walid Jumblatt’s Pro­gres­sive Social­ist Party, Samir Geagea’s Lebanese Forces and Amin Gemayel’s Pha­lange Party (which is related to the LF), is freak­ing out over the elec­tions. They’re act­ing like peo­ple who are scared to death of los­ing. Mean­while, Gen. Michel Aoun’s Free Patri­otic Move­ment is act­ing like a party that’s already won. (Aoun is allied with the pro-Syrian fac­tion in Lebanon and includes Hezbol­lah, Amal Move­ment and the Syr­ian Social­ist National Party.)

Con­tinue read­ing →

“My lat­est col­umn from Spot-on”:http://www.spot-on.com/archives/allbritton/2007/08/aint_nothing_but_a_family_thin.html:

Lebanon of late has been seized by what, in the West, is a rou­tine func­tion of democ­racy: a spe­cial elec­tion. And how the coun­try han­dles the Aug. 5 event, which has blown up into the lat­est cri­sis, is quite telling.
But first, some back­ground. Lebanon’s a com­pli­cated polit­i­cal place and its insider pol­i­tics have wider impli­ca­tions beyond its own small ter­ri­tory. These pol­i­tics have deep roots, based on dynas­ties and war­lordism, and the old fam­i­lies — which would be called “mafia” in less polite cir­cles — that run this place believe that this democ­racy busi­ness, grafted on some­what awk­wardly after the end of the French Man­date in the 1940s, should ensure that seats to which peo­ple are “elected” should be kept in the fam­ily.
The elec­tion dis­pute brings this into sharp focus, revolv­ing around the dis­trict of Metn, a Chris­t­ian enclave in the hills north of Beirut. One of its rep­re­sen­ta­tives in par­lia­ment was Pierre Gemayel, who was assas­si­nated last Novem­ber by an ambush in the street. He was also the Indus­try min­is­ter, one of the youngest mem­bers of par­lia­ment and solidly in the pro-Western fac­tion that con­trols the gov­ern­ment here in Beirut. His death was a major blow to the so-called March 14 alliance as the coali­tion of Druze, Sunni Mus­lims and about half the country’s Chris­tians has but a slen­der major­ity in Par­lia­ment and in the cab­i­net. If just a few more pro-government par­lia­men­tar­i­ans die or resign, the pro-Westerners will lose their major­ity in Par­lia­ment and the gov­ern­ment will fall.
And for many peo­ple here in Lebanon, that’s the goal. The oppo­si­tion forces, led by the Shi’ite mil­i­tant group Hezbol­lah and sup­ported by Syria and Iran, take a decid­edly anti-government, anti-U.S. and anti-Western stance. The oppo­si­tion also, curi­ously, includes the Free Patri­otic Move­ment, sup­ported by the other half of the country’s Chris­tians and headed by Maronite Chris­t­ian and for­mer Gen. Michel Aoun, one of Lebanon’s most con­tro­ver­sial fig­ures.
Bear with me on this digres­sion; it’s impor­tant. Aoun is by all accounts a national hero, an unbal­anced mega­lo­ma­niac and, if he gets his way, the future pres­i­dent. At the tail end of the vicious 1975 – 90 civil war, Aoun was appointed prime min­is­ter of a care­taker mil­i­tary gov­ern­ment by none other than Amin Gemayel, the slain Indus­try minister’s father, who was the out­go­ing pres­i­dent then and no con­sen­sus could be reached on who should suc­ceed him. Aoun seized the oppor­tu­nity and in 1989 declared a “war of lib­er­a­tion” against the Syr­i­ans then occu­py­ing most of Lebanon. By 1990, he had received the sup­port of Sad­dam Hus­sein (who bore no great love for the rival Ba’ath dic­ta­tor­ship in Dam­as­cus) and this proved to be his undo­ing. When the U.S. went to war against Sad­dam in 1990, Amer­ica let it be known that Syria could have Lebanon if it would ally against Iraq. And so, Syr­ian jets drove the gen­eral from the pres­i­den­tial palace and into a 15-year exile in France. He didn’t return to Lebanon until May 2005, fol­low­ing the retreat of the Syr­i­ans after a 29-year pres­ence here.
So who is run­ning to replace the late Pierre Gemayel as the Metn MP? His father, Amin, of course, the very man who appointed Aoun as Prime Min­is­ter back in 1988.
In a some­what unprece­dented chal­lenge to Lebanese tra­di­tions of “hered­i­tary elected offices,” Aoun — who is some­times called Nap­o­lAOUN” for his mes­siah com­plex — is run­ning one of his own can­di­dates, upset­ting the apple cart and split­ting Lebanon’s Chris­t­ian com­mu­nity even deeper. “In Lebanon, we don’t have laws, we have ethics,” said the pro-Western son of a promi­nent Shi’ite politi­cian to me the other night as we dis­cussed the Aoun-Gemayel spat in Metn. “It is not right that he tries to take the seat from the father.“
The Maronite Patri­arch, kind of a local-level pope with an almost equal level of influ­ence among Maronite Chris­tians has also called for Aoun not to con­test the elec­tion and stop divid­ing the Chris­tians. “The Lebanese are used to let­ting emo­tions pre­vail over legit­i­mate rights in sit­u­a­tions like this, par­tic­u­larly tragic sit­u­a­tions,” he said.
This casual atti­tude toward the hold­ing of elec­tions should dis­tress any­one who claims to believe in and desire democ­racy in gen­eral and for Lebanon in par­tic­u­lar. And it should really dis­tress the Bush admin­is­tra­tion, which has pointed to Lebanon’s “Cedar Rev­o­lu­tion” of 2005 as a win in its desire to pro­mote free­dom and democ­racy through­out the Mid­dle East as an anti­dote to extrem­ism. But now, the very fac­tions allied to the United States are look­ing to scut­tle a demo­c­ra­tic elec­tion, all in the name of pre­vent­ing a fur­ther “split” within one of Lebanon’s sects. Well, I’m sorry, but pub­lic splits are almost the def­i­n­i­tion of democ­racy. And even more offen­sive is talk from the Gemayel clan that the seat “belongs to the fam­ily.” As one colum­nist for the pan-Arab London-based al Hayat news­pa­per said, “it is also the kind of village-based atti­tude that makes oth­ers nau­seous.“
For while Aoun and his alliance with the ene­mies of Amer­ica are dubi­ous, shirk­ing the nec­es­sary foun­da­tions of democ­racy — actual, fair elec­tions — for a fake con­sen­sus among Lebanon’s Chris­tians does lit­tle to resolve any of the real issues of Lebanon or of the Mid­dle East. Democ­racy is not an add-on to a soci­ety, but a fun­da­men­tal basis for one. For the gov­ern­ment — which came to power demo­c­ra­t­i­cally — to attempt to bully polit­i­cal oppo­nents out of a race shows that Lebanon is not the show­case of progress that Bush thinks it is.
At the same din­ner with the Shi’ite scion, another woman told me, “It is this way in the United States, too. Look at Bush and his father. Look at Mrs. Clin­ton. Soon you will have 28 years of two fam­i­lies con­trol­ling Amer­ica. It is nor­mal.“
No, it’s not. Sure, Lebanon has one of the most robust democ­ra­cies in the Arab world. It doesn’t have a king or a pharaoh as Egypt does in Pres­i­dent Hosni Mubarak. The Lebanese peo­ple pride them­selves on their sophis­ti­ca­tion and like to look down on the author­i­tar­ian regimes around them as throw­backs to the Arab tribal men­tal­ity of the past. But even here, pol­i­tics ain’t noth­ing but a fam­ily thing. And until that changes, the Bush admin­is­tra­tion, itself a polit­i­cal dynasty, will have lit­tle hope of press­ing for democ­racy here, much less in the greater Mid­dle East.

George Packer got Michael O’Hanlon, he of the “infamous”:http://www.salon.com/opinion/greenwald/2007/07/31/ohanlon/index.html “op-ed”:http://www.nytimes.com/2007/07/30/opinion/30pollack.html extolling the suc­cesses in Iraq, and “man­aged to suss out some details”:http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/georgepacker/2007/08/ohanlon-and-pol.html:

He spoke with very few Iraqis and could inde­pen­dently con­firm very lit­tle of what he heard from Amer­i­can offi­cials. In eight days he trav­elled to half a dozen cities — *that’s not much time in each*. The evi­dence that four or five Iraqi Army divi­sions, with most of their bad com­man­ders weeded out, are now capa­ble of hold­ing, for exam­ple, Mosul and Tal Afar, *came from Amer­i­can mil­i­tary sources*. Pol­lack found that U.S. offi­cers sounded much more real­is­tic than on his pre­vi­ous trip, in late 2005. He gauged their reli­a­bil­ity in answers they gave to ques­tions that he asked “offline,” after a brief­ing — there was a min­i­mum of happy talk, but also a min­i­mum of dire gloom. The improve­ments in secu­rity, he said, are “rel­a­tive,” *which is a heavy qual­i­fi­ca­tion, given the extreme vio­lence of 2006 and early 2007*. And it’s far from clear that progress any­where is sus­tain­able. Every­where he went, the line Pol­lack heard was that *the cen­tral gov­ern­ment in Bagh­dad is bro­ken and the only solu­tions that can work are local ones*. (My emphasis.)

Yeah, that’s pretty much what I expected. From my time in Iraq, I would often hear from local com­man­ders who would tell me how great and suc­cess­ful their local area was going, but who couldn’t give me a broader pic­ture. (How could they? They were busy try­ing to deal with micro-level stuff.) The com­man­ders and embassy briefers who offered back­grounders rarely seemed to have feet planted in real­ity that I could see with my own eyes liv­ing out­side the Green Zone. (The CPA was the worst, by far. It was bet­ter under Khalilzad, who was more of a straight-shooter when he was on back­ground.)
But back to the “op-ed”:http://www.nytimes.com/2007/07/30/opinion/30pollack.html. O’Hanlon and Pol­lack have appar­ently tried to walk back a bit from their tri­umphal tone that was prob­a­bly what riled so many peo­ple up. (The head­line wasn’t theirs, so cut them some slack on that one.) And they did have some caveats about the polit­i­cal process hav­ing “huge hur­dles” to over­come. But while they may not have meant to deceive in their obser­va­tions of what sound like real improve­ments in secu­rity, they should have known that war sup­port­ers in the White House and in the media would leap on their piece like it was a life pre­server and use it in ways they may not have intended.
I’m sur­prised at the pair’s naivety in the writ­ing and mar­ket­ing of this piece. And I’m also sur­prised at their naivety in tak­ing such a lim­ited col­lec­tion of data as paint­ing a fuller pic­ture than there is in Iraq.

I’m com­ing a bit late to this, so my apolo­gies, but I’m curi­ous about [this op-ed](http://www.nytimes.com/2007/07/30/opinion/30pollack.html) by Michael O’Hanlon and Ken­neth Pol­lack of the Brook­ings Insti­tu­tion. In the piece, they say the war is going much bet­ter than peo­ple think, mainly because of the surge.

Here is the most impor­tant thing Amer­i­cans need to under­stand: We are finally get­ting some­where in Iraq, at least in mil­i­tary terms. As two ana­lysts who have harshly crit­i­cized the Bush administration’s mis­er­able han­dling of Iraq, we were sur­prised by the gains we saw and the poten­tial to pro­duce not nec­es­sar­ily “vic­tory” but a sus­tain­able sta­bil­ity that both we and the Iraqis could live with.

Now, this is pretty at odds with what’s been said pretty recently, even by [O’Hanlon](http://www.brookings.edu/fp/saban/analysis/june2007iraq_partition.htm) and [Pollack](http://www.brookings.edu/fp/saban/analysis/jan2007iraq_civilwar.htm). And it flies in the face of much of what’s being reported. But these guys were on the ground and that gives them at least some cred­i­bil­ity.
But I guess it depends on who you talk to. From my expe­ri­ence, the offi­cers — espe­cially the higher-ups — tended to happy-talk Iraq to such a degree that you won­dered if you were stand­ing on the same planet. It’s always the enlisted guys who tell you the straight talk, and it’s unclear how many grunts they talked to. From the op-ed, they cer­tainly spoke with advi­sors and cap­tains, and they were fer­ried around by the U.S. mil­i­tary. Did that color their think­ing when they wrote the arti­cle?
Note: I’m not one to give embed­ding a bad name. I under­stand that it’s the only way for for­eign­ers to move around Iraq these days (or at least in a heav­ily armed con­voy) and I don’t think that just because you’re embed­ded you’re drink­ing the Kool-Aid. But if the only peo­ple you talk to are Embassy polit­i­cal offi­cers and aides to Gen. David H. Petraeus, you’re going to get a pretty skewed view of things. Am I sug­gest­ing the mil­i­tary lied to the two to pret­tify the pic­ture? A few lies were cer­tainly told, but I have no idea what they were; I’m just famil­iar that the mil­i­tary will lie to pro­tect secrets, oper­a­tional plans and, yes, cover its col­lec­tive ass.
But peo­ple involved in a mis­sion will also lie to them­selves in order to make the sac­ri­fices they’ve endured — and Lord knows there are many for the guys over there — bear­able. And then they repeat those “true lies” to vis­it­ing jour­nal­ists and dig­ni­taries in an attempt to get some affir­ma­tion that yes, things are going bet­ter, this isn’t all a waste.
My friend George Packer, who I think is one of the smartest guys around, [has a num­ber of ques­tions about this trip that need to be answered](http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/georgepacker/2007/07/ohanlon-and-pol.html). As he writes:

At the heart of argu­ments over the war there has always been the ques­tion of what’s hap­pen­ing “on the ground.” It’s never been harder to find out than it is now, and in my expe­ri­ence, no news is gen­er­ally bad news. Over the past four years, Iraq has hum­bled a lot of peo­ple. What’s miss­ing from the Op-Ed is a nec­es­sary humility.

O’Hanlon tes­ti­fied yes­ter­day before the over­sights sub­com­mit­tee of the House Armed Ser­vices Com­mit­tee, chaired by my old con­gress­man Vic Sny­der, D-Ark., about his recent trip. Matthew Ygle­sias says he “[Totally backed down](http://matthewyglesias.theatlantic.com/archives/2007/07/ohanlon.php)” and said the progress was only against Al Qaeda in Iraq and that the civil war was as bad as ever. And there was no polit­i­cal progress, which was the whole point of the surge in the first place. So like many peo­ple, I’m skep­ti­cal about the facts and con­clu­sions drawn from the op-ed and I’m curi­ous as to why he took a more pes­simistic tone before Con­gress a day later.

The *New York Times* has an inter­est­ing piece today on the $20 bil­lion arms deal to Saudia Ara­bia and some of the other Gulf sheikhdoms. Mark Mazzetti and Helene Cooper write that the U.S. has admit­ted that the plan to pro­vide advanced weaponry to Saudi Ara­bia, Egypt and Israel is to con­tain Iran. Help­ing America’s friends in the Mid­dle East is para­mount the White House says, and the weapons will include “only defen­sive sys­tems.“
Why the U.S. felt the need to announce this is a mys­tery, since it’s a pretty obvi­ous con­clu­sion to draw. Did the Ira­ni­ans not get the mes­sage the first time? [They cer­tainly seem rather upset about the whole thing](http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/07/30/AR2007073000623.html/). Amer­ica “is cre­at­ing fear and con­cerns in the coun­tries of the region and try­ing to harm the good rela­tions between these coun­tries,” said Iran­ian For­eign Min­istry spokesman Moham­mad Ali Hos­seini. Shock­ingly, the U.S. blew off Iran’s con­cerns and coun­ter­charged that it was Iran that was doing the med­dling. “There isn’t a doubt that Iran con­sti­tutes the sin­gle most impor­tant single-country strate­gic chal­lenge to the United States and to the kind of the Mid­dle East that we want to see,” said Sec­re­tary of State Con­doleezza Rice en route to Egypt with Sec­re­tary of Defense Robert Gates.
(By the way, Lebanese Hezbol­lah is going to get *tons* of milage out of that com­ment. They like to fash­ion them­selves as the bul­wark against America’s “impe­ri­al­ist plans” in the Mid­dle East.)
Rice denied there was any *quid pro quo* for the pack­age, say­ing “We are work­ing with these states to fight back extrem­ism.” Yeah, what­ever. Back in Wash­ing­ton, under­sec­re­tary of state for polit­i­cal affairs R. Nicholas Burns didn’t get the memo, how­ever, say­ing, “We would want our friends in the region to be sup­port­ive not only of what the United States is doing in Iraq, but of the Iraqi gov­ern­ment itself.” Trans­la­tion: of *course* it’s a *quid pro quo*.
Who else might have missed the mes­sage that Iran was Pub­lic Enemy No. 1 in the Mid­dle East these days? Con­gress? It would seem so. The White House faced hos­tile ques­tions from law­mak­ers dur­ing closed brief­ings as to why the U.S. thinks new, “only defen­sive” weapons would deter Iran.
Ah. And there’s a rea­son for trum­pet­ing the Iran threat in prepa­ra­tion for these sales. Sen­a­tors and Rep­re­sen­ta­tives are eager to dis­tance them­selves from the Bush White House, and Israel is viewed as a trusted friend in the Mid­dle East. No mem­ber of Con­gress ever lost an elec­tion by stand­ing up for the Jew­ish state. By ques­tion­ing these deals, mem­bers up for reelec­tion get to defend Israel’s inter­ests. Even though Israeli Prime Min­is­ter Ehud Olmert has expressed approval of these sales to mod­er­ate Arab coun­tries, Israel is prob­a­bly look­ing for a lit­tle Con­gres­sional insur­ance — paid for with lob­by­ing dol­lars — to keep the bal­ance of power in its favor, despite assur­ances from the White House that they have noth­ing to worry about.
So it’s more than pos­si­ble that the White House is play­ing up the Per­sian peril as a way to keep them from block­ing the deals. By warn­ing of Iran, the White House can make the case that the weapons sales are actu­ally *good* for Israel, and that the weapons will be “only defen­sive.” How can you oppose stand­ing up to the great­est threat to Israel?
That prob­a­bly won’t com­fort the Israeli’s too much because as part of the pay­ment for sup­port­ing the Shi’ite-led gov­ern­ment of Iraqi Prime Min­is­ter Nouri al-Maliki, America’s Arab friends are buy­ing things that don’t seem “only defen­sive.” Egypt’s pack­age, for exam­ple, (which is sep­a­rate from the Gulf pack­age and “only” $13 bil­lion) includes advanced [AIM-9X Sidewinder missiles](http://www.globalsecurity.org/military/systems/munitions/aim-9x.htm), used on jet fight­ers for aer­ial com­bat. In the past, Israel has suc­cess­fully lob­bied the United States not to sell such mis­siles to Arab states out of fear that the bal­ance of power might shift. And Egypt’s a lot closer to Israel than it is to Iran.
So you see why the Israelis might on the one hand express no great con­cern — they’re get­ting $30 bil­lion extra them­selves over the next 10 years — and on the other have their allies in Con­gress ques­tion the wis­dom of sell­ing advanced mis­siles and smart bombs to neigh­bor­ing states they really don’t trust.
But why are these deals so impor­tant? Well, $20 bil­lion is a lot of money for defense con­trac­tors, who over­whelm­ingly donate to the Repub­li­can party. It’s also, obvi­ously, a reward and incen­tive for back­ing Maliki’s gov­ern­ment, which most Sunni Arab gov­ern­ments in the region see as an Iran­ian cats-paw. And finally, the weapons might deter Iran mak­ing Israel a lit­tle safer.
But I wouldn’t bet on it.
*Parts of this post draw on my writ­ings at [IraqSlogger.com](http://www.iraqslogger.com) — CA*