BEIRUT — Michel Aoun threw a fast­ball on the eve of the last day of Emile Lahoud’s term, propos­ing an inter­est­ing ini­tia­tive to break the dead­lock.
I’m still get­ting trans­la­tion, but it appears that he will with­draw his can­di­dacy for the pres­i­dency — which he has claimed as his “right” — but he will nom­i­nate a can­di­date who is not part of the his Free Patri­otic Move­ment bloc. This pres­i­dent would uphold his agree­ment with Hezbol­lah over its arms. (Aoun believes only his Mem­o­ran­dum of Under­stand­ing with the Party of God pro­tects the Shi’ite mili­tia from a mil­i­tary attack.)
Saad Hariri, leader of the Future Move­ment and the pro-Western bloc in the gov­ern­ment, should in turn nom­i­nate a prime min­is­ter who is not part of the major­ity bloc, but who would sup­port the inter­na­tional tri­bunal inves­ti­gat­ing the assas­si­na­tion of Saad’s father, Rafik Hariri. The tri­bunal is bit­terly opposed by Syria and its allies in Lebanon.
There was also some­thing about the major­ity would get 55 per­cent of the cab­i­net and the oppo­si­tion would get 45 per­cent — includ­ing two “sov­er­eign” min­istries. That gives it veto power. That won’t play well, prob­a­bly.
What’s most inter­est­ing is that Aoun made this ini­tia­tive pub­licly, in a press con­fer­ence, rather than the usual under-the-table man­ner of Lebanese politi­cians.
Quck reax analy­sis: This allows Hezbol­lah to accept another can­di­date other than Aoun, who was report­edly giv­ing Hezbol­lah and even Syria headaches. So I think Aoun has been made to real­ize he doesn’t have nearly the amount of sup­port among his allies or even among the Chris­tians he thought he did, and he was becom­ing an obsta­cle to get­ting Hezbol­lah out of the cor­ner it had painted itself into. Because make no doubt: this ini­tia­tive wouldn’t have gone for­ward with­out Syria’s bless­ing. It does allows Aoun to save some face. Maybe it will keep every­one happy until the next cri­sis.
In short, this is move­ment for­ward in a coun­try where dead­lock has been the order of the day for months.
Your play, March 14.
**UPDATE:** Hariri has rejected Aoun’s pro­posal and called for par­lia­men­tar­i­ans to gather for a vote tomor­row. Hezbol­lah and its allies have said they will boy­cott any ses­sion, mean­ing March 14 could be head­ing for a 50+1 vote. This could lead to a coup, two rival gov­ern­ments, street fight­ing and a host of prob­lems. This could be game on.

You may notice things look a lit­tle dif­fer­ent around here. I finally found some free time (and energy) to fix this damn blog, which had been nag­ging at me for a while now.
Gone is the old design — but enough remains that you should still feel com­fort­able. Com­ments are back again, so yay, more spam in the com­ments. Hope­fully you all will make use of them.
There are still some tweaks and other lit­tle things going on, so kick the tires. If you find some­thing that doesn’t work or look right, [drop me a line](mailto:chris@back-to-iraq.com?subject=That’s messed up, man). In the mean­time, I’m get­ting ready to get mar­ried, so Decem­ber ain’t going to be very inter­est­ing, I’m afraid. But 2008 is a new life, a new wife and all that, so things can only get bet­ter, right?

Think this blog is all about Iraq and Lebanon? Fear not, Afghanistan gets a lit­tle time, too, and I received this let­ter from reader Bob who wanted to draw atten­tion to a real prob­lem over there.

I have a son in the US Army. He spent a year in Afghanistan remov­ing land­mines and IEDs. He’s now in Iraq patrolling lit­tle vil­lages north of Bagh­dad. Through his deploy­ment in Afghanistan, I dis­cov­ered a 6 week con­sult­ing job in Kabul, help­ing launch an edu­ca­tional TV net­work there in 2005. I’ve kept in touch with sev­eral of the staff who have received very seri­ous death threats, and am try­ing to help them from the US. I spon­sored one jour­nal­ist who had to flee for his life to come to the US on a stu­dent visa. After a year, we got him rec­om­mended for polit­i­cal asy­lum.
Another, [Amin Wahidi](http://www.aminwahidi.blogspot.com) went to the Venice Film Fes­ti­val, but received threats that cul­mi­nated in “we’ll meet you plane with a sui­cide bomber when you come back to Kabul.” Italy granted him refugee sta­tus for 6 months, but we’re try­ing to get him into the US to go to school.

Amin’s story is cer­tainly har­row­ing. He’s a 25-year-old jour­nal­ist, film­maker and free-speech advo­cate from Kabul, who is liv­ing the deep­en­ing cycle of vio­lence in Afghanistan. It’s remind­ing many of life under the Tal­iban, when jour­nal­ists faced vio­lence and cen­sor­ship. Today, some of that is com­ing from the Afghanistan gov­ern­ment, Bob writes. “They have been threat­ened, arrested, jailed, kid­napped, had their stu­dios van­dal­ized, and been beaten.“
Sev­eral young media pro­fes­sion­als, includ­ing women, have been killed. This year, two have been mur­dered, caus­ing the few edu­cated and cre­ative peo­ple to flee Afghanistan. It sounds eerily sim­i­lar to what’s hap­pen­ing in Iraq.
And the [Com­mit­tee to Pro­tect Jour­nal­ist backs him up](http://www.cpj.org/attacks06/asia06/afg06.html). Things have been get­ting worse for every­one in Afghanistan over the last few years, despite the efforts of coali­tion and Afghan forces.
Focus­ing on Amin isn’t fair to the other Afghan jour­nal­ists who toil every day, but what he wants to do next is illus­tra­tive. He wants to come to the U.S. to fin­ish his edu­ca­tion, make films and doc­u­men­taries about Afghanistan and be a life­line for his left-behind col­leagues through the Afghan Acad­emy of Arts and Cin­ema Edu­ca­tion and The Film­mak­ers Union of Afghanistan. Most impor­tant, he wants to return to his native land to make films about the hur­dles to enter­ing the mod­ern world.
Per­haps by help­ing Amin, oth­ers can be helped, too. Any­one wish­ing to help can [email me](mailto:chris@back-to-iraq?subject=Helping Amin) and I’ll for­ward them on to Amin’s friend Bob here in the states.

My lat­est col­umn — hope­fully funny and bit­ing — [is up at Spot-on.com](http://www.spot-on.com/archives/allbritton/2007/10/its_giuliani_time.html). Here’s a sam­ple:

Look­ing at the U.S. Pres­i­den­tial con­test from afar, I can only shake my head with dis­be­lief. Sure, all of the can­di­dates, Democ­rats and Repub­li­cans alike, com­pete to see who can be a bet­ter bootlicker to Israel, but only one makes Israel and its defense — as well as the Global War on what­ever — the cen­ter­piece of his cam­paign. And only this one is truly, pro­foundly dan­ger­ous.
Rudy Giuliani’s bel­li­cos­ity and [Big Man style of governance](http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WPzgAoZYr3E) is a threat to domes­tic pol­i­tics, yes. For those of us over­seas who have cov­ered our eyes at the cas­cades of screw-ups that has been the Bush pres­i­dency, there is only one fright­en­ing thought. If Giu­liani wins the nom­i­na­tion and the Oval Office, we ain’t seen noth­ing yet. Because his for­eign pol­icy can be summed up in six words: “Ver­ily, I will kick Mus­lim ass.”

It was a fun col­umn to write.
In blog news, I *still* don’t have com­ments work­ing thanks to a lack of time to dig into the code. Sorry about that. I will get it fixed at some point.

Jim Michaels of USA Today reports that airstrikes in Iraq are on the rise this year, with 1,140 airstrikes launched in the first nine months of 2007 com­pared to 229 in all of last year. Airstrikes are up in Afghanistan, too, with 2,764 bomb­ing runs this year, up from 1,770 last year. Heli­copter gun­ship attacks aren’t included in those num­bers. The increase in Amer­i­can troops in Iraq — and their more fre­quent enemy engage­ment — has led to the need for more close air sup­port, the Air Force said, and with more insur­gents pushed out into the coun­try­side, they’re eas­ier to spot and hit. In both wars, air power is being used in lieu of exten­sive ground forces, admits Air Force Maj. Gen. Allen Peck, com­man­der of the Air Force Doc­trine Devel­op­ment and Edu­ca­tion Cen­ter. The down­side, given only brief men­tion in Michael’s story, is that these air strikes are more likely to kill civil­ians, despite the increased smart­ness of smart bombs, and that turns the Air Force into a recruit­ment tool for al Qaeda.

Plus, and just as impor­tant, they kill civil­ians, the moral wrong­ness of which seems to be lost in this story. Yes, it’s good to decrease rea­sons for locals to hate Amer­ica, but not killing inno­cent peo­ple is a good unto itself, no? Am I the only one get­ting tired of see­ing civil­ian casu­al­ties as some­thing to be avoided for tac­ti­cal rea­sons and not that it’s sup­posed to be wrong to kill inno­cent people?

Sec­ondly, O’Brien Browne, who teaches Mid­dle East­ern his­tory and pol­i­tics at Schiller Inter­na­tional Uni­ver­sity and inter­cul­tural com­mu­ni­ca­tion at Hei­del­berg Uni­ver­sity, argues that the rea­son for Iraq’s prob­lems are those damn colo­nial straight-edges, wielded by the likes of Gertrude Bell, T.E. Lawrence and Win­ston Churchill after World War I. So what’s the big deal if Iraq splits up?, he asks. Fur­ther­more, the three new regions in the coun­try for­merly known as Iraq should not even be called Iraq, because it’s a made up coun­try any­way, he says. It’s full of peo­ple who don’t want to live together, and the Ottomans had it right. Oddly, he present Ottoman rule as one of benign neglect, let­ting the … what­ever the peo­ple of the region should be called … run their own affairs as three provinces in the empire.

Well, that may have been true, but a large major­ity of Iraqis today don’t want the coun­try to be split up. Arabs across the region see any attempt to do so as Zion­ist plot to divide and con­quer the Arabs, and he ignores the thou­sands of fam­i­lies who are mixed Arab-Kurdish or Sunni-Shi’ite, as well as the eth­ni­cally diverse areas of Bagh­dad, Kirkuk, Basra and the like. Sim­plis­tic answers are often emo­tion­ally sat­is­fy­ing, but they usu­ally involve body counts. Where does the *Mon­i­tor* get these guys?