Sorry for all the emails today. I didn’t real­ize until not long ago that updat­ing old entries — even if just to change the text for­mat­ting — would send out emails. For every­one who got spammed, my sin­cer­est apologies.

BEIRUT — With all eyes turned to Annapo­lis, [another sig­nif­i­cant devel­op­ment hap­pened regard­ing Iraq](http://www.nytimes.com/2007/11/27/world/middleeast/27iraq.html). Pres­i­dent Bush and Iraqi Prime Min­is­ter Nouri al-Maliki signed a “[Dec­la­ra­tion of Principles](http://www.whitehouse.gov/news/releases/2007/11/20071126 – 1.html)” that would pave the way for a Sta­tus of Forces Agree­ment ([SOFA](http://www.globalsecurity.org/military/facility/sofa.htm)) on a long-term U.S. troop pres­ence in Iraq. (And by “long-term” I mean longer than 2013.)
Coin­ci­den­tally — or not, giv­ing the polit­i­cal sea­son upon us — the dead­line for final­iz­ing the agree­ment, which would include the num­ber of U.S. troops as well as the length of their deploy­ment, is set for July 31. That’s just in time for heat­ing up the 2008 pres­i­den­tial cam­paign! Ah, I can see it now. Vic­tory parades, bilat­eral agree­ments with a sov­er­eign Iraq, Democ­rats on the defen­sive. Nicely played, Mr. President.

Con­tinue read­ing →

My friends will tell you I’m an unabashed Mac guy. I love [Apple](http://www.apple.com) prod­ucts for their smooth­ness, their work­a­bil­ity, their [iconic and reas­sur­ing workflows](http://www.themodernword.com/eco/eco_mac_vs_pc.html). The Soon-to-be Mrs. Back-to-Iraq rolls her eyes at my obses­sion… Like­wise, as you can imag­ine, I’m no great fan of [Windows](http://www.microsoft.com).

This morn­ing, as I lis­tened to my friend’s com­plaints about the unpre­dictabil­ity of Win­dows — some­times things stop work­ing and then start again for no appar­ent rea­son what­so­ever — I real­ized that Lebanon works exactly the same way. And with the cur­rent, stu­pid cri­sis in Lebanon par­a­lyz­ing this place — lock­ing it up, so to speak — it occurred to me that Lebanon, such as it is, must be using Win­dows as its oper­at­ing sys­tem. Some similarities:

• It doesn’t feel well put-together. It’s a house of cards with an incon­sis­tent, incon­gru­ous inter­face. Where Mac OS X feels all of a piece, Win­dows (and Lebanon) feels cob­bled together. It’s as if some­one just slapped some legacy reli­gions and/or code together and said, “Go to town, play nice.” Well, .dll files aren’t always com­pat­i­ble, and, Sun­nis and Shi’ites, for exam­ple, don’t always get on together. Usu­ally they do, but when they don’t, look out.
• Fol­low­ing that, both Win­dows and mod­ern Lebanon were designed not with the users in mind, but the design­ers. In Microsoft’s case, Win­dows pri­mar­ily exists to make money for Bill Gates and Microsoft. Its reli­able cash stream come from big busi­ness, which tends to lock its employ­ees into using an OS that is obvi­ously on its last legs. Same for Lebanon. It was designed by the French using legacy Ottoman code which it stole — much like Microsoft did a shady deal to get MS-DOS — and set up to serve colo­nial inter­ests, rather than that of the Lebanese.
• Mod­ern Lebanon is, specif­i­cally, like Win­dows Vista. It’s shiny, nice to look at and eas­ily seduces. But the moment you actu­ally try to work with it, the nasty under­pin­nings — whether it’s sec­tar­i­an­ism or that damned Win­dows reg­istry — come up and bite you in the ass.
• It’s prone to viruses/outside inter­fer­ence by for­eign pow­ers that gum up the works. These can lead to…
• … Lock-ups that par­a­lyze the entire com­puter and/or coun­try. One dif­fer­ence: In the case of Lebanon, reboot­ing is a total hassle.
• It can be used to spew out junk email and/or jihadis if taken over by a hos­tile outsider.
• And finally, when it crashes, it crashes hard. Blue Screen of Civil War, anyone?

I know, I know… I’m open­ing myself up to fans of Win­dows who will tell me they’ve never, ever had a com­puter crash or a virus. Like­wise, I’m open­ing myself up to par­ti­sans of Lebanon who tell me that the place works just fine if you know how to work it. Obvi­ously, I don’t or I’d be hap­pily gin­ning up my [*wasta*](http://everything2.com/index.pl?node_id=1740626) and/or bleakly sub­mit­ting to the mess that’s Microsoft Office.

That’s not to say Lebanon and Gates’ lit­tle piece soft­ware don’t have their charms. The biggest one: In both cases, whether it’s pol­i­tics or soft­ware, there are more [games](http://ap.google.com/article/ALeqM5hqJ_5OmNTlIdB4U-SVQM73KkzH7wD8T4S8EG0).

My last col­umn of the year is [up at Spot-on now](http://www.spot-on.com/archives/allbritton/2007/11/going_long_on_the_golan_at_ann_1.html), look­ing at the dynam­ics of Syria’s par­tic­i­pa­tion in the Annapo­lis con­fer­ence. An excerpt:

There’s a Mid­dle East­ern proverb mak­ing the rounds these days: You can’t make war with­out Egypt and you can’t have peace with­out Syria. And if Syria’s sit­ting down at the table, as it’s indi­cated it will do at next week, it’s a safe bet that the fate of two key parts of the region — the Golan and Lebanon — are up for dis­cus­sion.
In two of the most intractable prob­lems of the region — Lebanon and the Israeli-Palestinian con­flict — the Syr­ian regime has been the immov­able obsta­cle. Because out­side the U.S., the Mid­dle East isn’t just defined by the Israeli-Arab con­flict. It’s a Gor­dian Knot of con­flicts involv­ing Israelis and Pales­tini­ans, Israel and Arabs, Arab Shi’ites and Arab Sun­nis, Arabs and Ira­ni­ans and the West and Iran. They’re all inter­twined, but the com­mon thread in this tan­gled skein is Syria and the regime of its Pres­i­dent Bashar al-Assad.
And in the past 48 hours, there has been signs of move­ment that might, just might sig­nal some kind of accord that the Syr­i­ans will accept. The Golan, the uplands seized by Israel from Syria in the 1967 war, is report­edly on the table at the Annapo­lis con­fer­ence which begins Tues­day. This was the pre­con­di­tion for Syria to attend the con­fer­ence, said its for­eign min­is­ter, Walid Muallem.
That’s very good news for the Amer­i­cans, the Israelis and pos­si­bly the Lebanese. Why? Because with Syria’s par­tic­i­pa­tion — along with Saudi Ara­bia and the other Arab states at the min­is­te­r­ial level — a suc­cess in Annapo­lis might mean the begin­ning of a real dis­cus­sion of a Grand Bar­gain for the region, not just another fit­ful start to Israeli-Palestinian nego­ti­a­tions. The think­ing is that if the Syr­i­ans are shown some flex­i­bil­ity on the Golan, they might also show some flex­i­bil­ity in Lebanon, which is in the midst of its worst polit­i­cal cri­sis since the end of the 1975 – 1990 Civil War — a polit­i­cal cri­sis stoked in large part by Syria and its allies in Lebanon.

You might be sur­prised at my conclusions.

BEIRUT — Well, Beirut is now in a state of ner­vous wait­ing… Wait­ing for some­thing, any­thing to hap­pen. Lahoud fin­ished out his term last night with all the pomp and cir­cum­stance he could muster. Too bad he couldn’t muster any local politi­cians to see him off, so despised he’s become. But before he left office, he may have put Lebanon under mil­i­tary con­trol after he declared a state of emer­gency.
Or did he? Some com­men­ta­tors are not­ing that his lan­guage — [“There are con­di­tions and risks on the ground that could lead to a state of emergency”](http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/middle_east/7110202.stm) — doesn’t actu­ally do any­thing more than reit­er­ate the cur­rent secu­rity sta­tus quo. The Army has already been respon­si­ble for secu­rity in Lebanon since an Inte­rior Min­istry deci­sion about six months ago.
And there’s been no upris­ing by Hezbol­lah, Aoun seems to be keep­ing his head down and Siniora’s gov­ern­ment is still around. Michel Suleiman, com­man­der of the Army, has pledged to fol­low the orders of the cab­i­net. Sure doesn’t sound like a mil­i­tary takeover to me.
What it sounds like is peo­ple wait­ing to see what hap­pens with Syria in Annapo­lis. If the Golan is put on the agenda, and Syria gets some for­ward momen­tum from Israel, then things might very well ease up here. I am work­ing on a col­umn explain­ing this dynamic for [Spot-on](http://www.spot-on.com), which should be up tomor­row. Until then, let’s hope no one does any­thing stu­pid here. The atmos­phere is a tight as a garrote.