Lebanon: war over, Israelis freaked, Arabs happy (BTW, did you even know who Nasrallah was, or what Hezbollah is, a month ago?)

1. And Now, Islamism Trumps Arabism – by MICHAEL SLACKMAN

SHE grew up in Cairo with the privileges that go to the daughter of a military officer, attended a university and landed a job in marketing. He grew up in a poor village of dusty unpaved roads, where young men work long hours in a brick factory while dreaming of getting a government job that would pay $90 a month.

But Jihan Mahmoud, 24, from the middle-class neighborhood of Heliopolis, and Madah Ali Muhammad, 23, from a village in the Nile Delta, have come to the exact same conclusion about what they and their country need: a strong Islamic political movement.

“I have more faith in Islam than in my state; I have more faith in Allah than in Hosni Mubarak ,” Ms. Mahmoud said, referring to the president of Egypt. “That is why I am proud to be a Muslim.”

The war in Lebanon, and the widespread conviction among Arabs that Hezbollah won that war by bloodying Israel, has fostered and validated those kinds of feelings across Egypt and the region. In interviews on streets and in newspaper commentaries circulated around the Middle East, the prevailing view is that where Arab nations failed to stand up to Israel and the United States, an Islamic movement succeeded.

“The victory that Hezbollah achieved in Lebanon will have earthshaking regional consequences that will have an impact much beyond the borders of Lebanon itself,” Yasser Abuhilalah of Al Ghad, a Jordanian daily, wrote in Tuesday’s issue.

“The resistance celebrates the victory,” read the front-page headline in Al Wafd, an opposition daily in Egypt.

Hezbollah’s perceived triumph has propelled, and been propelled by, a wave already washing over the region. Political Islam was widely seen as the antidote to the failures of Arab nationalism, Communism, socialism and, most recently, what is seen as the false promise of American-style democracy. It was that wave that helped the banned but tolerated Muslim Brotherhood win 88 seats in Egypt’s Parliament last December despite the government’s violent efforts to stop voters from getting to the polls. It was that wave that swept Hamas into power in the Palestinian government in January, shocking Hamas itself.

“We need an umbrella,” said Mona Mahmoud, 40, Jihan’s older sister. “In the 60’s, Arabism was the umbrella. We had a cause. Now we lack an umbrella. We feel lost in space. We need to be affiliated to something. Usually in our part of the world, because of what religion means to us, we immediately resort to it.”

The lesson learned by many Arabs from the war in Lebanon is that an Islamic movement, in this case Hezbollah, restored dignity and honor to a bruised and battered identity. People in Egypt still talk painfully about the loss to Israel in 1967, a loss that was the beginning of the end of pan-Arabism as an ideology to unite the region and define its people.

Hezbollah’s perceived victory has highlighted, and to many people here validated, the rise of another unifying ideology, a kind of Arab-Islamic nationalism. On the street it has even seemed to erase divisions between Islamic sects, like Sunni and Shiite. At the moment, the Hezbollah leader, Sheik Hassan Nasrallah , is widely viewed as a pan-Arab Islamic hero.

“The losers are going to be the Arab regimes, U.S.A. and Israel,” said Dr. Fares Braizat of the Center for Strategic Studies at the University of Jordan. “The secular resistance movements are gone. Now there are the Islamists coming in. So the new nationalism is going to be religious nationalism, and one of the main reasons is dignity. People want their dignity back.”

The terms Islamic nationalism and pan-Islamism have a negative connotation in the West, where they are associated with fundamentalism and terrorism. But that is increasingly not the case in Egypt. Under the dual pressures of foreign military attacks in the region and a government widely viewed as corrupt and illegitimate, Islamic groups are seen by many people as incorruptible, disciplined, efficient and caring. A victory for Hezbollah in Lebanon is by extension a victory for the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt.

“People will say Hezbollah achieved a very good thing, so why should we mistrust the Muslim Brotherhood,” said Hassan Naffa, a professor of political science at Cairo University.

There is a wide diversity of views and agendas under the pan-Islamic-Arab umbrella. But as is often the case in politically aligned movements, those differences are easily papered over when that movement is in the opposition.

“Hezbollah is a resistance movement that has given us a solution,” said Yomana Samaha, a radio talk-show host in Cairo who identified herself as secular and a supporter of separating religion and government. But when asked if she would vote for a Muslim Brotherhood candidate in Egypt, she said “Yeah, why not?”

It was an answer she seemed reluctant — but relieved — to state.

“If they have a solution,” she repeated, “why not?”

A solution to what?

“Loss of dignity,” said Mona Mahmoud, who is her friend.

Concepts of individual and collective identity are fluid here. During the British occupation of Egypt, a rise in Egyptian nationalism helped lead to independence in the early 1900’s. After the revolution of 1952, Gamal Abdel Nasser led the country and the region to seek unity under the banner of Arabism. That was a theme trumpeted by leaders from Col. Muammar el-Qaddafi in Libya to Hafez al-Assad in Syria to Saddam Hussein in Iraq.

But according to many political scientists and intellectuals, the glue of pan-Arabism began to weaken in Egypt after defeat in the Arab-Israel War of 1967, a decline that quickened through the 1970’s and into the 1980’s.

“People think that this defeat was a punishment from God because we drifted far from the teachings of Islam,” said Gamal Badawi, an Egyptian historian.

Since then there has been a steady and visible change in many Egyptians’ relationship to political Islam. It is not that Egyptians are suddenly more religious, political analysts said. This has always been a religious country. It is that they are more apt to define themselves by their faith. On the streets, that is most evident in the number of women — an overwhelming majority — who cover their heads with Islamic headscarves, a sign not just of individual conviction but also of peer pressure.

“The failure of pan-Arabism, the lack of democracy, and corruption — this drives people to an extent of despair where they start to find the solution in religion,” said Gamal el-Ghitany, editor of Akhbar al-Adab, a literary magazine distributed in Egypt.

Echoing that view, Diaa Rashwan, an expert in Islamic movements and analyst with the government-financed Center for Political and Strategic Studies in Cairo, said, “People have come to identify themselves more as Muslims during the last five years in response to the U.S.-led ‘war on terrorism’ which Egyptians frequently feel is a discriminatory campaign targeting Muslims and Islam worldwide.”

But it is not just outside pressures that have pressed so many people of this nation, and this region, toward that view. The events that helped shape Mr. Muhammad’s world view from his Delta village illustrate the way the government of Egypt also plays a role.

Last December Mr. Muhammad’s uncle, Mustafa Abdel Salam, 61, was shot in the head and killed by the Egyptian police as he was going to pray at a mosque, according to witnesses, including Mr. Muhammad and other villagers. The killing occurred on the last day of voting in Egypt’s parliamentary elections, a months-long process that was marred by police officers who were ordered to block voters from getting to the polls in many districts. The government grew concerned after candidates affiliated with the Muslim Brotherhood began winning in record numbers. While the brotherhood is banned, candidates affiliated with the organization ran as independents.

The government says that the police did not fire live ammunition at citizens, but many people were killed and doctors and witnesses — including Western diplomats — said that the police did fire live rounds into people trying to vote. After the election was over and Mr. Abdel Salam was buried, the brotherhood-affiliated candidate visited the family to offer his condolences and help. The winning candidate, from the governing National Democratic Party , did not visit.

Mr. Muhammad said that the whole experience strengthened his conviction that “Islam is the solution” — a phrase that is the slogan of the Muslim Brotherhood. “Our voice is not heard,” said Mr. Muhammad. “It is only the authorities who have a say. The smallest thing, like we go to vote, and we get beaten. So I will hold on to my religion, and that’s it.”

(Mona el-Naggar contributed reporting from Egypt for this article,and Souad Mekhennet from Amman, Jordan.)


2. Hezbollah's transformation is a case study -- by Carol Rosenberg (from McClatchy Newspapers)

TEL AVIV, Israel - The Hezbollah force that fought Israel to a draw in a month-long border conflict is the product of a two-decade, Iranian-nurtured program that took a guerrilla group and transformed it into a full-blown Shiite Muslim army.

Interviews with Israeli soldiers and officers as well as published accounts of battles and analyses by experts on military affairs show that Hezbollah has been able to integrate an astonishing array of military capabilities, far outstripping what many Israelis understood were its abilities.

How Hezbollah grew into what one commentator has called the fifth most powerful army in the Middle East is a lesson sure to be studied not only by Israelis but also by their potential opponents in Gaza and the West Bank and by militia groups the world over. In Iraq, where Iran is deeply involved in political developments, the Shiite cleric Muqtada al-Sadr is said to have made Hezbollah the model for his Mahdi Army militia.

It also bodes ill for hopes that Hezbollah might be restrained by the presence of U.N. peacekeepers or the Lebanese army, which began deploying in southern Lebanon this week after agreeing not to search for Hezbollah weapons.

"They've been hiding their tracks beautifully," said Timor Goksel, a former U.N. peacekeeper who spent 20 years in southern Lebanon and now teaches a course in ethnic conflict at the American University of Beirut. "Even I'm surprised that they were able to build all these systems."

"This was a real army, a command army, well trained and well equipped," said political scientist Gerald Steinberg, the director of the Conflict Management and Negotiation program at Israel's Bar Ilan University. The Palestinian Hamas movement, he said, "will want it more than they ever wanted it before, and they'll have to work harder than ever to get it. Everybody is going to be much more aware and much more willing to let Israel take action precisely to prevent a situation where Gaza turns into south Lebanon."

To be sure, Israel knew much about Hezbollah's military capabilities. Israeli intelligence had detected a 2003 shipment of long-range, Iranian-made Zelzal-2 missiles, which arrived at the Damascus airport in flights returning to Syria after delivering blankets and other emergency relief supplies to earthquake victims in Iran. Israeli officials said they didn't reveal the shipment at the time because they were afraid of tipping off Hezbollah and its allies to their sources.

Israeli military officers also were aware that Hezbollah was constructing a network of bunkers and tunnels on Israel's northern border. One reserve general called them the "infrastructure of an underground Tehran." They knew as well that Hezbollah fighters were regularly shuttling between Lebanon's Bekaa Valley and Iran for advanced training.

But the depth of Hezbollah's development became clear only once Israel attacked its installations in Lebanon in what some initially envisioned as a one- or two-week campaign. After slightly more than four weeks, Israel agreed to a cease-fire that left Hezbollah intact as the strongest political and military force in Lebanon.

The Israeli invasion showed that Hezbollah, with Iran's help, had taken hundreds of small steps to create a powerhouse. Among them:

-It acquired thousands of Russian-made anti-tank missiles from Syria and Iran, then trained its forces to use them. The missiles were startlingly effective not just against Israeli tanks but also against houses and other buildings where Israeli troops sought shelter.

-It set up a top-down, stealthy military structure that tightly controls operations and is led by a covert chief of staff whose name isn't known to the Israelis or at least isn't made public. Israeli military officials think that some promising Hezbollah fighters have been sent to special Iranian command courses.

-It established a combat-ready organization: a logistics branch to handle the delivery of food, fuel and munitions; a black-clad special forces unit to conduct daring combat missions and abduct Israeli soldiers; navy commandos; and an infantry that trains for complex operations and supports the other units.

-It set up a reserve system that consists of former full-time fighters who can be called back to service and "weekend warriors" who undergo regular training but generally haven't seen combat.

It also created an intelligence unit that recruited a Bedouin spy inside the Israeli army and an air wing that sent drones on test runs over Israel in 2004 and 2005, on flight paths similar to those that its Katyusha rockets followed this summer as they rained down on Israel.

It has Shiite fighters who speak Hebrew, perhaps learned on patrols along the northern border in earshot of Israeli broadcasts. This makes some Israeli soldiers suspect that they were being overheard.

It's also kept its command structure largely secret.

Its uniforms have no emblems and insignia that could help Israeli soldiers sort out the commanders from the rank and file in combat. If Israeli intelligence has an organizational chart, it hasn't made it public.

"It's a well-organized army, unified, well-equipped - a big Shiite army," said Iftach Shapira, an analyst for The Middle East Military Balance, a publication of the Jaffee Center for Strategic Studies in Tel Aviv. "It happened slowly. We knew this army was being built, but I think we didn't appreciate just how strong it was."

Israelis think that Iran is intimately involved in training Hezbollah, which was founded largely at the behest of the Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, the Muslim cleric who toppled the shah of Iran in 1978 and died in 1989.

At the time of Hezbollah's beginnings, Israel occupied southern Lebanon and the United States had sent peacekeeping forces in an effort to separate warring Lebanese sides in a civil war. Hezbollah's first homegrown military leader, Imad Mugniyeh, a Shiite who served with the Palestine Liberation Organization's elite bodyguard unit, is thought to have planned the suicide bombings in Beirut of the U.S. Embassy and the Marine barracks.

Iran dispatched an estimated 100 Revolutionary Guards to help Hezbollah set up military camps in the Bekaa Valley, where they provided ideological and Islamic education and boot camp-style training.

Since then, according to Israeli military intelligence estimates, as many as 1,000 Lebanese recruits a year have been sent to Iran for specialty training in using rockets, anti-tank missiles and other weapons.

To reinforce the recruits' fervor, their Iranian hosts take them on pilgrimages to shrines and mosques around the Shiite heartland, according to Brig. Gen. Yossi Kuperwasser, until recently Israel's chief of intelligence analysis.

The pilgrimages are important, Kuperwasser said, to provide a religious underpinning to their training.

"The main thing they teach is brainwashing them with their Islamic interpretation of the Quran," he said. "A soldier without motivation is not a soldier."

Much of Israel's freshest information on Hezbollah presumably is coming from the 20-plus Hezbollah fighters it took prisoner in the conflict. Israeli television aired a seven-minute clip from one such interrogation, and provided McClatchy Newspapers with an English-language transcript.

In the clip, the prisoner, Hussein Ali Suleiman, 22, said he joined Hezbollah when he was 15 and studied Hezbollah ideology at a night school until, at age 17, he was sent to 45 days of basic training at a Hezbollah base in Baalbeck, in the Bekaa Valley.

Later that year, he and 40 to 50 others traveled to Iran, first by four-wheel-drive to Syria along a military lane that didn't require passport checks, then aboard a flight to Iran. There, he got advanced training in operating and firing anti-tank missiles in a four-man unit.

He said his unit was deployed twice to southern Lebanon to snatch Israeli soldiers. The first mission was unsuccessful. On the second, on July 12, they killed three soldiers and abducted two others. That raid touched off the most recent fighting.

His assignment: If Israeli armor pursued Hezbollah kidnappers, his unit would fire missiles at the tanks to immobilize them.

Israeli military officers said Suleiman's story illustrated the sophistication of Hezbollah's planning. They noted that not only was he briefed on his role but that his unit also practiced the operation four days before the border incursion.

Israeli officials acknowledge that intelligence gaps led to casualties. For example, Israel didn't know that Hezbollah had acquired sophisticated C-802 land-to-sea guided missiles, one of which struck an Israeli navy ship, the Hanit, off the Lebanese coat, killing four sailors.

Had Israel known about it, officers said, the ship's captain would have engaged an anti-missile system that would have averted the strike.

Israeli intelligence officers won't discuss whether Israel has penetrated Hezbollah successfully. But news accounts make it clear that Hezbollah has infiltrated Israel.

In one case Hezbollah recruited a spy, Israeli army Col. Omar al Heib, a Bedouin scout and Israeli citizen, who provided insights into how the army operated in exchange for heroin and hashish. He was discovered and convicted of espionage last year, and is serving a 15-year sentence.

Hezbollah also made use of unmanned Muhajir aircraft obtained from Iran and capable of carrying camera equipment to over-fly Israel. One of the drones passed over northwestern Israel in April 2005, hours before President Bush and then Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon held a news conference in Crawford, Texas.

Israeli soldiers have been stunned by Hezbollah's first-strike strategy. First Sgt. Guy Nehama's paratroop unit lost its commander, a lieutenant, when Hezbollah commandos fired an anti-tank rocket through the wall of a house in the village of Ait a Shaab where they were staying during the third week of the conflict. The impact sent shards of metal flying, decapitating the commander before his eyes.

"Maybe the IDF knew," Nehama said, referring to the Israel Defense Forces. "But the people of Israel didn't know that the Hezbollah got so much stronger."

Goksel, the former U.N. peacekeeper, said that every Hezbollah member in south Lebanon had three changes of clothing in his closet: dress uniforms for parades, fatigues to fight in and the ordinary civilian clothes he wears by day to mask his membership.


3. US Media Providing Distorted View of Mideast Conflict – by Andrew Gumbel

If these were normal times, the American view of the conflict in Lebanon might look something like the street scenes that have electrified the suburbs of Detroit for the past four weeks.

In Dearborn, home to the Ford Motor Co. and the highest concentration of Arab Americans in the country, up to 1,000 people have turned out day after day to express their outrage at the Israeli military campaign and mourn the loss of civilian life in Lebanon. At one protest in late July, 15,000 people -- almost half of the local Arab American population -- showed up in a sea of Lebanese flags, along with anti-Israeli and anti-Bush slogans.

A few miles to the north, in the heavily Jewish suburb of Southfield, meanwhile, the Congregation Shaarey Zedek synagogue has played host to passionate counterprotests in which the U.S. and Israeli national anthems are played back to back and demonstrators have asserted that it is Israel's survival, not Lebanon's, which is at stake here.

Such is the normal exercise of free speech in an open society, one might think. But these are not normal times. The Detroit protests have been tinged with paranoia and justifiable fear on both sides. Several Jewish institutions in the area, including two community centers and several synagogues, have hired private security guards in response to an incident in Seattle at the end of July in which a self-described American Muslim man walked into a Jewish Federation building and opened fire, killing one person and injuring five others.

On the Arab American side, many have expressed reluctance to stand up and be counted among the protesters for fear of being tinged by association with Hezbollah, which is on the United States' list of terrorist organizations. (As a result, the voices heard during the protests tend to be the more extreme ones.) They don't like to discuss their political views in any public forum, after the revelation a few months ago that the National Security Agency was wiretapping phone calls and e-mail exchanges as part of the Bush administration's war on terror.

They are even afraid to donate money to help the civilian victims of the war in Lebanon because of the intense scrutiny Islamic and Arab charities have been subjected to since the 9/11 attacks. The Bush administration has denounced 40 charities worldwide as financiers of terrorism and arrested and deported dozens of people associated with them. Consequently, while Jewish charities such as the United Jewish Communities are busy raising $300 million to help families affected by the Katyusha rockets that rained down on northern Israel, donations to the Lebanese victims have come in at no more than a trickle.

Outside Detroit and a handful of other cities with sizable Arab American populations, it is hard to detect that there are two sides to the conflict at all. The Dearborn protests have received almost no attention nationally, and when they have, it has usually been to denounce the participants as extremists and apologists for terrorism -- either because they have voiced support for Hezbollah or because they have carried banners in which the Star of David at the center of the Israeli flag has been replaced by a swastika.

The media, more generally, have left little doubt in the minds of a majority of American news consumers that the Israelis are the good guys, the aggrieved victims, while Hezbollah is an incarnation of the same evil responsible for bringing down the World Trade Center -- a heartless and faceless organization whose destruction is so important it can justify all the damage Israel inflicted on Lebanon and its civilians.

The point is not that this viewpoint is necessarily wrong. The point -- and this is what distinguishes the U.S. from every other Western country in its attitude to the conflict -- is that it is presented as a foregone conclusion. Not only is there next to no debate, but also debate itself is considered unnecessary and suspect.

The 24-hour cable news stations are the worst offenders. Rupert Murdoch's Fox News has had reporters running around northern Israel chronicling every rocket attack and every Israeli mobilization but has shown little or no interest in anything happening on the other side of the border. It is a rarity on any of the cable channels to see any Arab being tapped for expert opinion on the conflict. A startling amount of airtime, meanwhile, is given to Michael D. Evans, an end-of-the-world Biblical "prophet" with no credentials in the complexities of Middle Eastern politics.

He has shown up on MSNBC and Fox under the label "Middle East analyst." Fox's default analyst, on this and many other issues, has been right-wing provocateur and best-selling author Ann Coulter, whose main credential is to have opined, days after 9/11, that what America should do to the Middle East is "invade their countries, kill their leaders and convert them to Christianity."

Often, the coverage has been hysterical and distasteful. In the days after the Israeli bombing of Qana, several pro-Israeli bloggers started spreading a hoax story that Hezbollah had engineered the event, or stage-managed it by placing dead babies in the rubble for the purpose of misleading reporters. Oliver North, the Reagan-era orchestrator of the Iran-Contra affair who is now a right-wing television and radio host, and Michelle Malkin, a sharp-tongued Bush administration cheerleader who runs her own Web blog, appeared on Fox News to give credence to the hoax -- before the Israeli army came forward to take responsibility and brought the matter to at least a partial close.

As the conflict has gone on, the media interpretation of it has only hardened. Essentially, the line touted by cable news hosts and their correspondents -- closely adhering to the line adopted by the Bush administration and its neoconservative supporters -- is that Hezbollah is part of a giant anti-Israeli and anti-American terror network that also includes Hamas, al-Qaida, the governments of Syria and Iran and the insurgents in Iraq. Little effort is made to distinguish among those groups or explain what their goals might be. The conflict is presented as a straight fight between good and evil, in which U.S. interests and Israeli interests intersect almost completely. Anyone who suggests otherwise is likely to be pounced on and ripped to shreds.

When John Dingell, a Democratic congressman from Michigan with a large Arab American population in his constituency, gave an interview suggesting it was wrong for the U.S. to take sides instead of pushing for an end to violence, he was quickly and loudly accused of being a Hezbollah apologist. Newt Gingrich, the Republican former House speaker, accused him of failing to draw any moral distinction between Hezbollah and Israel. Rush Limbaugh, the popular conservative talk-show host, piled into him, as did the conservative newspaper The Washington Times. The Times was later forced to admit it had quoted Dingell out of context and reprinted his full words, including: "I condemn Hezbollah, as does everyone else, for the violence."

The hysteria has extended into the realm of domestic politics, especially because this is a congressional election year. Republicans have sought to depict the primary defeat of Democratic Sen. Joe Lieberman of Connecticut, one of the loudest cheerleaders for the Iraq war, as some sort of wacko extremist anti-Semitic, anti-Israeli stand that risks undermining national security. Vice President Dick Cheney said Lieberman's defeat would encourage "al-Qaida types" to think they can break the will of Americans. The fact that the man who beat Lieberman, Ned Lamont, is an old-fashioned East Coast Wasp who was a registered Republican for much of his life is something Cheney chose to overlook.

Part of the Republican strategy this year is to attack any news medium that either attacks the administration or has the temerity to report facts that contradict the official party line. Thus, when Reuters was forced to withdraw a photograph of Beirut under bombardment because one of its stringers had doctored the image to increase the black smoke, it was a chance to rip into the news agency over its efforts to be even-handed. In a typical riposte, Malkin denounced Reuters as "a news service that seems to have made its mark rubber-stamping pro-Hezbollah propaganda."

She was not the only one to take that view. Mainstream, even liberal, publications have echoed her line. Tim Rutten, the Los Angeles Times' liberal media critic, denounced the "obscenely anti-Israeli tenor of most of the European and world press" in his most recent column.

It is not just the U.S. media that tilt in a pro-Israeli direction. Congress, too, is remarkably unified in its support for the Israeli government, and politicians more generally understand that to criticize Israel is to risk jeopardizing their future careers. When Antonio Villaraigosa, the up-and-coming Democratic mayor of Los Angeles, was first invited to comment on the Middle East crisis, he sounded a note so pro-Israeli that he was forced to apologize to local Muslim and Arab community leaders. There is far less public debate of Israeli policy in the U.S., in fact, than there is in Israel itself.

This is less a reflection of American Jewish opinion, which is more diverse than is suggested in the media, than it is a commentary on the power of pro-Israeli lobby groups such as the American-Israeli Political Action Committee, which bankrolls pro-Israeli congressional candidates. That, in turn, is frustrating to liberal Jews such as Michael Lerner, a San Francisco rabbi who heads an anti-war community called Tikkun. Lerner has tried to argue for years that it is in Israel's best interests to reach a peaceful settlement and that demonizing Arabs as terrorists is counterproductive and against Judaism.

Lerner is probably right to assert that he speaks for a large number of American Jews, only half of whom are affiliated with pro-Israeli lobbying organizations.

Certainly, dinner-party conversation in heavily Jewish cities such as New York suggest misgivings about Israel's strategic aims, even if there is some consensus that Hezbollah cannot be allowed to strike with impunity.

Few, if any, of those misgivings have entered the U.S. media.

"There is no major figure in American political life who has been willing to raise the issue of the legitimate needs of the Palestinian people, or even talk about them as human beings," Lerner said. "The organized Jewish community has transformed the image of Judaism into a cheering squad for the Israeli government, whatever its policies are. That is just idolatry and goes against all the warnings in the Bible about giving too much power to the king or the state."


4. The fight reflex
With the ceasefire, the guerrillas are returning to what is left of their homes in Lebanon. But for some, the next battle can't come too soon
Essay by Ghaith Abdul-Ahad (from the good old Guardian)

The Muhammad family arrived back at their home in the south of Lebanon three days after the ceasefire. Twenty-five people - women, children of all ages, and their grandmother - were squashed inside two rickety cars piled high with mattresses, food boxes and cooking pots. Pictures of the Hizbullah leader, Hassan Nasrallah, were taped to the back windows. Their house was intact, but there was a look of gloom on everyone's faces. The father sat on the steps and took off his shoes, the children gathered around him quietly as the mother sat in a corner weeping silently. The eldest son of the family, Sheikh Hassan, a very religious young man, had stayed behind in the village to fight. He was a Hizbullah member and this war was his first battle. He wasn't in the house.

Then: "Sheik Hassan, Sheik Hassan," shouted a small boy as he came running up the street. Behind him came a young man with a thick beard and eyebrows, dressed in a clean brown shirt and a baseball cap. His mouth was wide with a big grin, and five boys and girls were pulling his shirt and hands.

The women, his sisters and cousins, jumped on him, kissed him on the forehead and on his cheeks. His fiancée hugged him, held his head and kissed him on the cheek. A taboo for a religious man in times of peace, but today was a day of celebration. Sheik Hassan's grin grew bigger.

"It's OK, it's OK! Nothing happened to me. I was with the brothers here; why did you worry so much?"

A young boy put his face on Sheik Hassan's chest and wept; the elder women ululated and sang: "You made us victorious over the Jews ..."

Up in the living room, Sheik Hassan started to tell friends and family his stories. "Everyone wanted to fight - the young teenagers would come to us asking for weapons. Hizbullah told them to go, we have enough fighters. They would weep, refusing to leave - we had to give some of them weapons," he recounted.

Sheikh Hassan was one of hundreds of fighters - most of them from Hizbullah, but others from different Shia factions, along with communists and nationalists - who fought against Israeli troops. In the days following the ceasefire, the ones who survived came out to tell their stories.

In the village of Mais al-Jabal, Sheik Hussein, who had been with Hizbullah since he was a young boy, was recruited into a cell with other fighters.

"We had our weapons ready. They gave me an AK47, and we sat in one of the houses," he said, as a little boy sat next to him, holding his arm and listening attentively. "The Israelis talk about tunnels and caves, but it wasn't like this. They like to exaggerate our strength. We didn't have any tunnels in this town; we stayed in normal houses and waited.

"The most difficult moment in the war came when the Israelis approached the outskirts of the town. Our commander told us: be ready to die. Even with faith and even if you have been raised waiting for martyrdom, it's a difficult moment," he said.

"I thought of the little kids, my sisters, my fiancée. I wrote my will and waited. We considered ourselves as martyrs in waiting."

In the town centre, the traces of the battle were all around: tank tread on the tarmac, shrapnel, shell holes. A graveyard had been pummelled with artillery and ranks of yellow Hizbullah flags stood on ledges facing the last valley before Israel.

"The Israelis had everything in this war: drones, jet fighters, helicopters, and tanks, the Merkavas. Do you know what a Merkava is? The fourth generation of the Merkava?

"But we had God fighting on our side, we had God."

Sheik Hussein's cap fell and a big white bandage appeared on his shaved forehead. "I look around and I see my brothers and I can't believe it - how did we survive? Under all that bombing, we came out alive with few scratches.

"We didn't use suicide bombers at this battle. In each village, there were people waiting to do martyrdom operations, but we didn't need it. If you have a rocket that can do the job, why do you need a man?"

Mustafa started fighting when he was 17. He is now 35. He is a poor Shia, and like many of his generation, he fought against the Palestinians, the Israelis, as well as Christian and other Shia militias in Lebanon's civil war. In his partially destroyed living room, he walked me past the photographs hanging on his wall.

"That's me in Beirut in 1987." He pointed at a picture of himself dressed in jeans and trainers, carrying an M16 rifle. "We were fighting Hizbullah then." He pointed at pictures of other young men, their portraits mixed with those of religious imams and flowers. "This one is my brother, that is my cousin, next to him my father-in-law. They are all martyrs."

Times have changed, and Mustafa, a fighter for Amal, a Shia militia turned political party and a long-time foe of Hizbullah, found himself in a bunker fighting with Hizbullah against Israel.

"I hate them, those Hizbullah, they are arrogant and they believe they are holy because they fought Israel. Look at them walking in the street as if they have liberated Jerusalem," he said. Everywhere around him in the town of Khiam, a few kilometres from the Israeli border, Hizbullah fighters were standing on street corners.

"But if your town is attacked by the Israelis, everyone will fight, whether they are Amal, the communists or the nationalists. They [Hizbullah] don't have the right to monopolise the resistance."

Through the rubble of the town, hopping between boulders of concrete, he started to recount his days in the war.

"This was the worst thing in my life. They bombed non-stop. If you heard the jet, then you were safe, but when you didn't hear it then you knew they would bomb next to you or they will bomb you."

Inside a nearby house, the room where the fighters slept and waited had nothing to do with Shia Islam or militias; it was the room of a teenager. Palm prints decorated the walls, a blue curtain with white stars dangled from the ceiling, and a poster of rapper Nelly was hung high.

Mustafa jumped on the bed. Above him was an Amal flag and a poster of a half-naked woman.

"We slept here for five days. You don't think of tomorrow, you live each day and when it is finished you say: I survived. I had pressure on my head like someone squeezing my head. Everyone started thinking like everyone else - for example, if you have a headache, all will say I have a headache." After five days, they were spotted and an Israeli air strike flattened the upper levels of the house. "There was silence. I wanted to scream but couldn't. My voice was flat and the men started shouting: allahu akbar, allahu akbar. Smoke and dust filled the room. I couldn't breathe. We ran quickly out of the house, hid under a tree and then went to another house."

Back in the street, he picked up a few bullets and pointed at a mangled car. "This car was filled with ammunition when it was hit - we stored ammo everywhere.

"You get scared after hearing all the bombs and shelling. Sometimes we lose our nerve," he said. "But there is nothing more valuable than your country. You can change your family every few years, you can marry again and have more kids, but your country you have for once and it stays with you."

On Monday, the first day of the ceasefire, on another street corner away from the town centre in Khiam, stood a young Hizbullah fighter, with thick beard, wearing a black military uniform covered with dust and a pair of military boots. "I haven't had food since last Thursday," he said. "We had some chocolate bars - we had a chunk in the morning and another chunk at night.

"You know how you wait to see a lover you haven't seen for two or three years? This is how we were, waiting to see the Jews," he said. "I wish that I could have fought them face to face, but they hid in their tanks. They tried to enter Khiam after they got into Marjeyoun. We were waiting for them, and we hit them, not with RPGs [rocket-propelled grenades], because for a heavy Merkava an RPG will just scratch the surface, but with a real anti-tank weapons. I missed the first shot, but they gave me a new position and I hit the second, but it didn't come cheap. My best friend - he was like my brother - was killed two days ago."

He looked tired and drawn, although proud of his role in the battle.

"I am here to see some friends and then go back to my position. You can't trust those Jews," he said as he moved away through the rubble. "Maybe they will try to come back later tonight - who knows?"

Abu Ali, a commander from Amal, is tall, bald and missing two fingers from his left hand. He walked around Khiam inspecting damage and looking for his men. "We don't have the same capabilities as Hizbullah, so we had to rely on them for IEDs [improvised explosive devices] and rockets, but we fought together. They didn't consult us when they started the war, but when you see the Israelis it doesn't matter any more.

"On Thursday morning, a column of Israeli tanks tried to come to the town. We were waiting for them in the low lands between Khiam and Marjeyoun. We were four groups of Hizbullah and Amal fighters, we fired at them from everywhere, we hit few tanks and they couldn't retrieve them till Sunday night."

Abu Ali is a professional fighter: when the Lebanese civil war ended, he went to Africa, fighting in the jungles between Sierra Leone and Liberia, made some money and came back to his home town after the Israelis withdrew in 2000 with enough money to build a big house. But he never stopped thinking about fighting.

"Its just like when you flirt with a girl. Hitting a tank is the same: you get closer and closer and then you hit. It's not really different from hunting a bird."

As a commander, he had to move around the safe houses telling his fighters to get ready. Sometimes he delivered food. "A car would drive very fast through the town, drop sacks of tinned food and bread at street corners - not at the safe houses themselves - and we would go and collect them, all under the threats of the drones."

In a nearby building, fighters sat around two red plastic tables. One was slicing tomatoes, while two others emptied tuna and sardine cans.

"We used to sit like this before the war. This is our celebration lunch. We have won this battle, and it's over, but the war is not over - as long as the Israelis are there and we are here, we will fight," said Abu Ali, as he stuffed some tuna into his bread.


5. Lebanon, Israel and the “greater west Asian crisis”
The Lebanon war is part of an interlocking convulsion that is rearranging the geopolitical chessboard in the wider region. It's the "greater west Asian crisis", says Fred Halliday (from openDemocracy.com


All wars are different, but the war between Israel and Hizbollah of 12 July-14 August 2006 proves indeed that some are more different than others. It may be that this war has resemblances to other conflicts in the recent history of the region, but it is in important respects both a departure from and more than its predecessors:
it is more than an Arab-Israeli war of the kind seen on five previous occasions since 1948
it is more than another chapter in the war of Lebanon, which began in 1975-6 and lasted to 1990
it is more than (even if linked to) the wars that have in different parts of the region ensued from the Iranian revolution of 1979.

A first definition of its distinctiveness is that it is a war for supremacy and survival in the region as a whole: a newly-emerged political and strategic space that encompasses India, Pakistan and Afghanistan as well as Iran, the Arab world and Israel. As with the United States-led regime changes in Afghanistan (2001) and Iraq (2003), so with the Lebanon war of 2006 – the causes also belong to, and the effects will be felt, throughout this region: from Beirut and Tel Aviv to Baghdad, Kabul, and Mumbai.

This is the primary sense in which the war of summer 2006 is different: for this superficially quite localised war (in terms of its field of operations) is but one dimension of a complex of interlinked problems that connect Haifa to Herat and all points between. It is now possible to talk, without oversimplifying distortion, of a single, many-layered crisis that since the mid-1990s has both arisen from and given definition to a new world region: not just a "middle east" but a "greater west Asia".

A tectonic shift

Each individual conflict in this region – Palestine, Iraq, Afghanistan, Iran, and now Lebanon – may be interrelated, but it is the "how" and the "how far" that must be defined. It is a familiar part of political and intellectual discourse in the middle east to seek to put events in individual countries or sub-regions into a broader regional or global context. This process can often be accompanied by a conspiratorial or secret-agenda gloss (the Arab-Israeli conflicts, the Iran-Iraq war, revolution in Yemen, civil war in Sudan or Algeria, and sundry assassinations or oil-price movements are just a few examples); it can also be impelled by reference to external agencies or institutional powers (the cold-war matrix, the global "Zionist" movement, the machinations of old imperial powers such as Britain and France, and in recent years "globalisation" and United States "democracy promotion" are some of the ones invoked).

The challenge today is to move beyond such regressive or disempowering approaches and articulate the connections at the level of the current, dynamic reality of states, inter-state relations, non-state actors, and the array of political and social forces across greater west Asia.

For today, the assimilation of individual countries and events to a broader regional pattern is an emergent fact: events in Lebanon and Israel, Iraq or Afghanistan, Turkey and Libya, are becoming comprehensible only in a broader regional and even global context (the latter includes both US policy and the shifting interests and power of Russia, India and China).

The linkage so frequently invoked has become transparent, kaleidoscopic reality:
a reality of states, who look at their neighbours' nuclear and other programmes and react accordingly
a reality for the opposition and military groups who operate in different states of the region
a reality, in an age of satellite TV, for public opinion
a reality of the outside world – particularly the United States and Europe, which are trying with almost no success to contain and manage the tensions in the region.

Today, this new reality is evident in a host of ways, including the new pan-Islamic consciousness that ties Arab with non-Arab causes and is evident among Muslims living in Europe as much as in the Arab world. It is also reflected by default in the selective language of US military and political strategy. George W Bush has proposed a "greater middle east initiative" (one of the most pathetic projects of all time) but his conception of this area is revealing: it includes Afghanistan (as for the purposes of his "war on terror" it must), yet excludes the country more responsible than any for spreading terrorism, Islamic fundamentalism, nuclear proliferation and corruption across the region, namely Pakistan.

A fresh canvas

The wider significance of the war between Israel and Hizbollah is part of this new reality. It is natural that many in the immediate region have viewed it as the sixth in the series of Arab-Israeli wars (1948-9, 1956, 1967, 1973, 1982). There are indeed points of comparison:
in the insecurity it has bred in Israeli cities, and in the connection between external intervention and more local resistance (1948-9)
in the large-scale Israeli intervention in Lebanon (1982)
in the involvement of the United Nations Security Council (1956, 1967 and 1973).

But the deeper reality is different. It is not just the sixth Arab-Israeli war, a revival of the Lebanese civil war, an internationalisation of the second Palestinian intifada , or the latest outbreak of the "war on terror"; it is more than all of these – part of another, broader and more protracted conflict with multiple centres and involving a rapidly shifting coalition of regional states with political and social movements.

The key point of origin is 1979. With the benefit of a generation's hindsight, it is now clear that this conflict has been in train since the late 1970s – and in particular, since the two strategic detonations of the last year of that decade, the Iranian revolution of February and the Soviet intervention in Afghanistan in December.

The shape of "greater west Asia" and the establishment of linkages that were to produce such lethal effects were already evident in the era of those convulsions. The Israeli intervention in Lebanon in 1978 made its contribution, but it was the Iranian revolution and the sustained state-support provided to the Lebanese Shi'a which helped both incubate Hizbollah and transform the Israeli-Lebanese confrontation of 1978 into protracted conflict.

It was also in the Lebanese war of the 1980s that Iran and its Lebanese allies first engaged, with considerable military and political consequence, with both Israeli and the United States. Meanwhile, to the east of the region, the young Islamic Republic state was being tested and hardened in the eight-year war with Iraq; and the US and its conservative Arab allies, with a little help from Israel, were encouraging the guerrillas and killers of the Afghan mujahideen from whom Osama bin Laden and his associates were to emerge.

These origins have grown diverse fruits. In light of the Lebanon war, two are particularly relevant. First, the major protagonists on the Arab side is not a state but an armed political groups – and Hizbollah will as a result prove much more difficult to negotiate and reach agreement with than was the case in earlier wars.

Second, insofar as states such as Syria and Iran are involved on the side of Hizbollah, they will pursue their involvement in a way quite different to Arab states in earlier conflicts. For they are now not primarily interested in armistices, frontier delimitation or peace negotiations, but in using the Lebanon conflict to bargain with the US on other issues, and to enhance their nationalist and radical legitimacy at home and regionally.

In the case of Iran, there is no direct or immediate causal relation between Tehran's major role inside Iraq, its nuclear-enrichment plans, and its support for Hizbollah – but all do form part of a broader Iranian drive for regional influence and for confrontation with the US and its major allies (Egypt, Saudi Arabia and Israel).

This greater west Asian crisis is more complex, multilayered and long-lasting than any of the individual crises, revolutions or wars that characterised the middle east. The current west Asian wars involve a triangular conflict, involving:
Iran and its radical allies (Syria, Iraqi Shi'a parties, Hizbollah, Hamas)
the forces of radical Sunni insurgency (in Iraq and in the al-Qaida network)
the US and its regional allies.

In Lebanon, the Iran-US conflict is predominant; in Afghanistan or Saudi Arabia it is the Sunni -US dimension; in Iraq the conflict embraces all three points of the triangle, with the US pitted against both Shi'a and Sunni , even as members of these two groups kill and terrorise one other.

It is in this multidimensional context, rather than in the memory of earlier bilateral, Arab-Israeli wars, that the current Israeli-Hizbollah conflict must be seen. In the perspective of a longer history it can be said to resemble the European war that began in 1914 – another regional conflict long-planned even if suddenly, almost casually, detonated; and one which, once started, drew all the major states of the area into its wake, with dire consequences for all and catastrophic for many. It is a sobering comparison, but nothing in the current pattern of events across greater west Asia makes it extreme. There may be possibilities for progress in the present moment, but currently it is the dangers that are far easier to see.


6. Ahmadinejad roadshow seduces an adoring public
Eyewitness report: Iran's president arrives on a US-made helicopter - an evangelist from the sky
By Simon Tisdall in Meshkinshahr, Iran (from the good old Guardian)

He arrives amid a hurricane of swirling brown dust and deafening noise. A dense, rolling cloud of straw and dirt sweeps across the parched field, enveloping turbaned dignitaries, battering the hoisted green, white and red flags of Iran, and forcing thousands of enthralled onlookers to shield their eyes.

As the rotors of the venerable American-made Huey 214 chopper spin slowly to a halt, and the murk clears, a great, human noise replaces the sound of engines. It is not cheering; more like a giant, murmuring sigh, punctuated by shouts of joy and the screams of women.

For Meshkinshahr, a city perched on the desiccated Caspian steppes and mountains west of Ardabil, this dramatic descent to earth has the momentous significance of a prophetic visitation. Local elders say there has been nothing like it in years. Children are out of their heads with excitement.

But President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, clambering out of the helicopter cabin with a big smile on his face, is getting used to it. His visit, part of a magisterial three-day, nine-city procession through Ardabil province in north-west Iran, is the 18th such meet-the-people expedition since he took office one year ago this month.

Mr Ahmadinejad's extraordinary comings and goings are a cross between American-style town meetings, itinerant Islamic evangelism, and pure political theatre. Think Bill and Al's "excellent adventure" during the 1992 US presidential campaign; think Saladin on a soap box; then add a straggly beard, wrinkly, unexpectedly twinkly eyes, a gentle, open-handed style, and a genuine ability to connect - and you have Mr Ahmadinejad, a local hero (he was formerly governor of Ardabil), a would-be champion of Muslims everywhere, and an unlikely grassroots superstar.

The political confidence of a man condemned in the US and Europe for his threats against Israel and his Holocaust denial is plainly growing. It is the first time the Tehran government has allowed a western reporter to witness one of his barnstorming tours. And there is lots to watch.

"We love him. We love Ahmadinejad," says Mahnaz Dargahi, a young woman in her 20s dressed in full hijab and ankle-length chador, who is watching a rally in Nir. "He's very popular. He does a lot for the youth. His focus is on the development of the country and on the poor people." Her friends nod in agreement, giggle, then pull their scarves closer to their faces.

"He is a nice man," says Nafice Mohammadzade, 10, the daughter of an Iran-Iraq war martyr, after presenting the president with a bouquet. "He asked my name and what grade I'm in. He said he hoped I would make progress in life and in Islam." Nafice was given a plastic presidential ballpoint and a scroll.

"We welcome the president," says Ahmad Asaadi, 40, a Turkish-speaking man in the town of Parsabad Moghan. "He's defending our country. He cares about people. He's hard-working. We need more jobs here. He understands the problems we have with schools, with bureaucracy, with the water. He will do something for us."

Exultant

Speaking from a platform decorated with flowers and Qur'anic verses in the city of Ardabil, Mr Ahmadinejad does not disappoint an exultant crowd of up to 20,000 spilling over the pitch of a football stadium. Facing him is a sea of banners and photographs of himself and Ayatollah Khomeini, leader of Iran's 1979 revolution. Two young men have climbed to the top of a floodlight gantry and are frantically waving the flags of Iran, Palestine and Hizbullah.

Men and women are strictly segregated behind crash barriers, and local clerics and other luminaries sit cross-legged in a special enclosure at the front. All but the most ancient mullahs are waving, shouting, hooting and chanting phrases such as "Ahmadinejad, you have the scent of rosewater" and "Nuclear power is our essential right" (it sounds better in Farsi).

The young men, packed tightly together, are heaving with excitement and energy. The women, the majority under 25, seem to be drowning in black, only the white ovals of their faces standing out from their robes. But they, too, are hopping and prancing (dancing and singing is, of course, forbidden). It is like a pop festival without the music.

Mr Ahmadinejad may not know much about the Holocaust. But he certainly knows how to work a crowd. He begins slowly, softly, talking to his audience as if to friends. He is no ranter, no demagogue. His words caress and seduce, they do not impose or dictate. But then, with the crowd's voice rising and falling with his own, his address gathers pace, strength and purpose. "We will build a railroad from Ardabil to Tehran," the president announces to loud cheers. This is a long-delayed project. Now, magically, it has the go-ahead. "We will build a petrochemical plant." Another cheer. "We will reduce the interest rate on loans so young people can get jobs and start their own businesses."

The cacophony of applause just grows and grows. And down on the pitch, aides collect bundles of letters and written pleas for financial or other help, all of which they say will receive the president's personal consideration.

Like a Persian emperor of old, but dressed in a circa 1970s casual fawn jacket, Mr Ahmadinejad dispenses favours and justice with a flick of his wrist. His modern-day satraps, Ardabil's governor and MP, watch nervously, wondering, perhaps, how they will pay for all this largesse.

Then he switches to international affairs. The US and Britain "have disgraced the UN security council by opposing a ceasefire in Lebanon", he says. Cheers. Lebanon is "the real Holocaust". The impotent council should be renamed the "council for massacres". More cheers. "God's promises have come true. On one side there are the corrupt powers of the criminal US and Britain and the Zionists with modern bombs and planes. On the other side is a group of pious youth relying on God." Hizbullah's resistance has succeeded, he says. Theirs is the glory. The crowd roars.

"Kofi Annan [the UN secretary-general] talked to me on the phone," Mr Ahmadinejad suddenly reveals, as if letting his listeners into a secret. "He told us not to be angry about the UN resolution [that ordered Iran to stop its nuclear activities]. But nuclear power is our right. No one can take this way from us. The security council is a puppet of the Global Arrogance (this is Mr Ahmadinejad's new term for the US, formerly known as the Great Satan). The people will make a "new Middle East", not the Americans ...

"The enemies of Iran are trying to divide the Iranian nation. But they should know the people are wise to this trick. They will not fall for it again. Our main task is to develop and build the Iranian nation. No one will stop us." By now the crowd is beside itself. And Mr Ahmadinejad has hardly raised his voice.

"We hate the UK," says Abdul Ali Majnoni, 39, after the speech. "The UK and the US are imposing their ideology on other people. Tony Blair is a Satan and his appearance is like a fox."

His companions titter at his strong language. Iranians are generally extremely polite. Mr Majnoni smiles. "Don't take it personally," he says.

The rally speeches, repeated with local variations throughout Ardabil province, serve several purposes. They bolster nationalist sentiment, especially over nuclear power; and they emphasise Iran's leadership role among Muslim and developing countries.

The provincial tours are a reminder to political rivals and reformists that Mr Ahmadinejad, the blacksmith's son who came from nowhere, is a formidable political force whose support is apparently growing. They speak directly to the youth in a fast-growing nation where the majority is under 30. And they also seem designed to prepare ordinary people for sharpening confrontation with the west, including tougher US-directed sanctions.

Not all Iranians are happy about Mr Ahmadinejad's leadership. He faces considerable criticism among the secular-minded urban elite, intellectuals and middle class professionals who abhor his social conservatism. The president is also described by some as a front man for sinister rightwing and fundamentalist forces that are dragging the country backwards. In much of the US and western Europe, Mr Ahmadinejad's outspoken and sometimes shocking anti-Israeli statements have further isolated Iran.

Outspoken

For Mr Ahmadinejad's provincial speechifying carries another, more profound message, and it is repeated wherever he goes. It appears aimed as much at George Bush and the western "crusaders" as his Ardabil followers. And it tells of a future in which the justice of the righteous, as discerned by the president, will triumph.

"God has the power. No human being has all the power. Power is a gift from God," he tells his audience. They are hushed now, listening intently. "Power has to be used to help people. This applies to the leaders of countries as well as ordinary people. God rewards believers and those who have patience. Those who believe should not be scared of anything. For God is with you. The people of Lebanon are believers. They were not scared. And they did succeed. God kept his promise to the people of Lebanon. And he has given them victory."

And, in the Ahmadinejad roadshow, the victory of the Iranian faithful is also only a matter of time.