Middle East: Iran still winning; Ahmadinejad challenged by Iran journalists; Iraqi hospitals no safe haven, etc.

1. Iran has been strengthened -- by Avner Cohen

WASHINGTON - It is hard to imagine worse international timing for Israel's lack of success in Lebanon. Israel's inability to defeat Hezbollah contributed significantly to the atmosphere of powerlessness that has reigned in the international community over the Iranian nuclear issue. If, at the start of the summer, this issue was seen as a challenge for international diplomacy, today, it is considered an unadulterated headache. The results of the fighting in Lebanon greatly complicated the handling of this issue and significantly strengthened Iran's balance of deterrence with the West.

In Iran's eyes, Hezbollah's success reinforced the ethos that entrenchment, stubbornness and motivation are capable of overcoming military superiority. If a small military organization such as Hezbollah could survive a massive onslaught by the Israel Air Force, then this is all the more true for a strong country such as Iran. The story of the Al-Manar television station, which the IAF was unable to put out of operation despite numerous attempts, is, from Iran's standpoint, a parable for the survival of its nuclear program.

In recent years, the Iranian government has turned the issue of nuclear development, and especially its uranium enrichment program, into a symbol of sovereignty and national honor. Iran claims it has an unassailable right, both by treaty and by international law, to produce every element of the nuclear fuel cycle, even as it stresses that its goal is nuclear fuel and not nuclear weapons.

The Iranian rejection of the Security Council's demand that it freeze its enrichment program as a condition for negotiations left no doubts about Tehran's determination. Today, even more than in the past - and Hezbollah's success merely bolstered this attitude - Iran is refusing to make concessions on the nuclear issue. True, it is not interested in sanctions, but it will not allow fear of sanctions to damage the core of its nuclear program.

As Iran's determination grows, the West's resolution weakens. It is not just that today, the Western public, especially in the United States, has no interest in talk about exercising the military option against Iran: The Israeli experience in Lebanon weakened belief in the ability of aerial bombing to achieve diplomatic goals. Rather, it seems there is a fear of any confrontation with Iran.

The American fiasco in Iraq and the 34 days of pointless fighting in Lebanon have engendered fatigue over the use of force in the United States. A confrontation with Iran means another dramatic rise in gasoline prices, which are already very high. The statements made two months ago about economic sanctions against Iran under the auspices of the Security Council are now dissolving rapidly.

An American friend who holds a senior position, and who has been steeped for years in the secrets of the diplomatic effort over Iran, told me this week that he has never been this depressed, as a result of the West's inability to act with determination on the issue of nuclear proliferation. He cannot detect in any Western capital a leadership with the determination and the public support to take action to stop Iran's nuclearization. The only capital in which he discerns determined leadership with a clear strategy and direction is Tehran.

There is a feedback mechanism between Iranian belligerence and Western defeatism. Just as Iran today is more deterring than deterred, the reverse is true of the West. Just as Hassan Nasrallah likened Israel to a spiderweb, the Iranians now see the West as a dog that barks, but does not bite. The Western nations' inability to enforce the Security Council resolution on Iran is the clearest expression of this syndrome.

Had Israel beaten Hezbollah, this might have endowed the West with a bit of confidence in a confrontation with Iran. Instead, Israel's failure deepened the West's fatigue syndrome along the entire front.

The writer is a senior researcher at the University of Maryland and author of the book "Israel and the Bomb."


2. We think of Iran as despotic, but in this Teheran press conference, President Ahmadinejad catches as much crap from Iranian journalists as Bush does from White House correspondents.

Iranian President Meets Press and Is Challenged -- by MICHAEL SLACKMAN

TEHRAN — President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad meant to use Tuesday to focus attention on his challenge to the president of the United States: a face-off in a live televised debate.

But at a freewheeling two-hour news conference, Mr. Ahmadinejad also found himself challenged by local reporters who questioned the government’s economic program and its tolerance of a critical press.

The marathon question-and-answer session offered a window into one of the many contradictions of Iranian politics and governance: even as the government grows more authoritarian, it is openly criticized and challenged on its performance.

This was Mr. Ahmadinejad’s fourth news conference since taking office a year ago, and it came just three days before a deadline set by the United Nations Security Council for Iran to suspend its enrichment of uranium.

The president used the opportunity to continue Iran’s defiant posture toward the West — the United States and Britain in particular. He made it clear that Iran would not meet the deadline and that it would risk sanctions.

“I announce that I am fully prepared to debate world and international issues with George Bush in a televised debate,” he said in his prepared remarks. “Of course, only under the conditions that this debate is broadcast live and without censors, especially for the nation of U.S.”

Although the White House immediately dismissed the challenge as a diversion, Mr. Ahmadinejad’s remarks appeared intended to further three objectives: to position Iran as taking the moral high ground by making the United States look like the party unwilling to talk; to drive a wedge between the United States and Britain on one side and France and Germany on the other; and to reiterate Iran’s determined refusal to give up its enrichment program.

“Peaceful nuclear energy is the right of the Iranian nation,” he said, repeating what has become a mantra of his administration. “The Iranian nation has chosen that based upon international regulations, it wants to use it, and no one can stop it.”

The news conference veered off into an unruly question-and-answer session, with reporters praising the president, questioning him and some jumping from their seats demanding that their questions be taken. The president politely admonished one reporter, saying he needed to behave better.

One reporter said he had no question but wanted to recite poetry.

A reporter for a small newspaper called The Path of the People stood to ask a question and said: “I was hoping when you arrived I would share my pain with you. Now I have no pain in my heart, only happiness.”

But as the conference continued, Mr. Ahmadinejad found himself challenged on several issues of local importance, most focusing on the economy or on efforts to silence criticism of his government in the press.

One reporter said the government’s decision to spend billions of dollars to subsidize gasoline amounted to welfare for the rich, an assertion the president disputed. Another said that although the president claimed to support the press, his spokesman sought to have the judiciary investigate critical reporters.

“This contradicts what you said,” the reporter said into the microphone as Mr. Ahmadinejad listened. The same reporter said the president’s interior minister had denied permits to 14 groups wanting to hold demonstrations.

The president responded quickly, dismissing the complaints, and he tried to move on. But the challenges kept coming — not one after the other, but more consistently as the confidence in the room seemed to grow.

“Food is very expensive to buy,”‘ said Nasser Alaghbandan, a reporter with the Tehran daily Jam-e-Jam, adding that whenever anyone asked the government spokesman about that issue he responded by citing government sticker prices, not actual prices.

At first Mr. Ahmadinejad responded with a quip, saying maybe the reporter should go shopping at the same store as his spokesman. He eventually said the rate of inflation was actually lower since he took office, but acknowledged that more needed to be done to bring down some specific costs, especially housing.

“I am not happy it increased,” he said of the cost of housing.

As the news conference demonstrated, Iran’s leadership faces two primary challenges simultaneously, its nuclear program and its economy. On the nuclear front the president was resolute. On the economy, the issue that was the core of his campaign, he cited some accomplishments but asked for patience and more time.

“I did not expect in 10, 11, 12 months, I did not expect the economic programs of the government would be tangible everywhere,” he said, adding that they had been felt by some people.

The president, in his now trademark cream-colored suit and open collar with no tie, entered the packed conference hall from a side door. He climbed up onto a platform and briefly held his right hand over his head in a sort of hero’s greeting to the crowd.

He smiled through much of the conference, joked with questioners, and bobbed and weaved around many questions. He avoided answering directly when asked if Iran would be willing to take steps to prove that it was not after a nuclear weapons program, or if it would be willing to have face-to-face talks with the United States.

But Mr. Ahmadinejad did give some insight into sometimes ambiguous meaning of some of his statements. On Saturday the president said, “We are not a threat for any country, even the Zionist regime that is the enemy of the countries in the region.”

A reporter asked if that represented a change in position from his earlier call for Israel to be removed from the region. He replied by saying that swatting a baby’s hand to stop it from putting its fingers in a fire is not a threat.

“We are a peaceful country,” he said, “but recognize legitimate defense as our legal right.”

Iranian officials have also said they will be willing to hold talks on all issues regarding their nuclear program, so long as there are no preconditions. Asked if that meant that the government would be willing to consider, in the course of negotiations, suspending uranium enrichment, the president said: “We are ready to negotiate. They can put any question to us. Our response will be based on the inalienable rights of Iran.”

On the topic of debating his American counterpart, Mr. Ahmadinejad’s objective seemed as clear as when he sent Mr. Bush a letter last spring asking him to re-examine his foreign policies in the light of his Christian values.

While the White House dismissed the letter, and many of Iran’s own intellectuals scoffed at it, the Iranian president won points among his growing legion of followers in the region. Political analysts said he was hoping for the same response with the debate proposal.

“He is saying we want to talk, but Bush is refusing,” said Mustafa el-Labbad, an expert in Iranian affairs based in Cairo. “He wants to embarrass him by saying, ‘We are willing to negotiate, but he is refusing.’ ”


3. Iraqi Hospitals Are War's New 'Killing Fields'
Medical Sites Targeted By Shiite Militiamen
By Amit R. Paley (from the Washington Post)

BAGHDAD -- In a city with few real refuges from sectarian violence -- not government offices, not military bases, not even mosques -- one place always emerged as a safe haven: hospitals.

So Mounthir Abbas Saud, whose right arm and jaw were ripped off when a car bomb exploded six months ago, must have thought the worst was over when he arrived at Ibn al-Nafis Hospital, a major medical center here.

Instead, it had just begun. A few days into his recovery at the facility, armed Shiite Muslim militiamen dragged the 43-year-old Sunni mason down the hallway floor, snapping intravenous needles and a breathing tube out of his body, and later riddled his body with bullets, family members said.

Authorities say it was not an isolated incident. In Baghdad these days, not even the hospitals are safe. In growing numbers, sick and wounded Sunnis have been abducted from public hospitals operated by Iraq's Shiite-run Health Ministry and later killed, according to patients, families of victims, doctors and government officials.

As a result, more and more Iraqis are avoiding hospitals, making it even harder to preserve life in a city where death is seemingly everywhere. Gunshot victims are now being treated by nurses in makeshift emergency rooms set up in homes. Women giving birth are smuggled out of Baghdad and into clinics in safer provinces.

In most cases, family members and hospital workers said, the motive for the abductions appeared to be nothing more than religious affiliation. Because public hospitals here are controlled by Shiites, the killings have raised questions about whether hospital staff have allowed Shiite death squads into their facilities to slaughter Sunni Arabs.

"We would prefer now to die instead of going to the hospitals," said Abu Nasr, 25, a Sunni cousin of Saud and former security guard from al-Madaan, a Baghdad suburb. "I will never go back to one. Never. The hospitals have become killing fields."

Three Health Ministry officials, who spoke on condition of anonymity for fear of being killed for discussing such topics publicly, confirmed that Shiite militias have targeted Sunnis inside hospitals. Adel Muhsin Abdullah, the ministry's inspector general, said his investigations into complaints of hospital abductions have yielded no conclusive evidence. "But I don't deny that it may have happened," he said.

According to patients and families of victims, the primary group kidnapping Sunnis from hospitals is the Mahdi Army, a militia controlled by anti-American Shiite cleric Moqtada al-Sadr that has infiltrated the Iraqi security forces and several government ministries. The minister of health, Ali al-Shimari, is a member of Sadr's political movement. In Baghdad today, it is often impossible to tell whether someone is a government official, a militia member or, as is often the case, both.

"When their uniforms are off, they are Sadr people," said Abu Mahdi, another of Saud's cousins. "When their uniforms are on, they are Ministry of Interior or Ministry of Health people."

Abdullah said only a small percentage of the Health Ministry's 30,000 employees are known members of the Mahdi Army. But he acknowledged that militia membership among personnel in the agency's 15,000-member security force might be much higher.

"I have no way of knowing if they are related to Sadr or not," Abdullah said. "If there is no criminal record, we hire them."

Sunnis' increasing suspicion of hospital workers is perhaps the most vivid illustration of their widespread distrust of the Shiite-led government. Suhaib al-Obeidi, 35, a supermarket owner from the heavily Sunni district of Adamiyah, said he lost his final ounce of confidence in the government during a brush with death in a hospital two weeks ago.

On a quiet weekday morning, as Obeidi unloaded canned chicken and Pepsi from a van and into his store, a gunfight broke out on the street and a spray of bullets struck him, he said -- first in his right shoulder, then in his back. As he tried to crawl away, another bored into his leg. A friend shoved his bleeding body into a taxi and took him to nearby al-Nuuman Hospital.

But when they arrived, a friendly doctor warned them that the Mahdi Army was coming to arrest Sunnis, Obeidi said. So they sneaked out to another hospital, Medical City in the Bab al -Muadam district, to get treatment.

"Tell me where you live!" a nurse at Medical City snapped at the arriving patients, Obeidi recalled, as the staff moved residents of mainly Sunni areas into a separate room.

A few moments later, he saw Mahdi Army troops handcuff five Sunni men who were donating blood -- including the friend who had brought him to the hospital -- and haul them out of the hospital, Obeidi said. A Sunni doctor ran up to him and said he would be killed unless he fled immediately.

Wearing only underwear and some bandages the doctor had applied to his wounds, Obeidi escaped in a taxi to the home of his in-laws in the upscale Mansour district. He lay in bed for an hour as he waited for the Sunni doctor to follow him from the hospital. The bed was drenched in so much blood that his family later dumped it in the trash.

"You were only a few minutes away from death," said the doctor, who arrived at the home an hour later. The doctor, one of the few Sunnis at Medical City, asked that his name not be used because he felt it would further endanger his life.

Inside an illegal clinic in a dingy apartment building, the doctor operated on Obeidi for seven hours. But Obeidi hasn't been able to get any follow-up treatment; he has vowed never to set foot in a hospital again, even if he is mortally wounded or deathly ill.

"I'd rather go to the pharmacy and take random simple medicine," he said.

The reluctance of Sunnis to enter hospitals is making it increasingly difficult to assess the number of casualties caused by sectarian violence. During a recent attack on Shiite pilgrims, a top Sunni political leader accused the Shiite-led government of ignoring large numbers of Sunnis who he said were also killed and wounded in the clash, though he was unable to offer even a rough estimate of the Sunni casualties.

"The situation is so bad that people are just treated inside their homes after being attacked by the Shia militias," said the official, Alaa Makki, a leader of the Iraqi Islamic Party, part of the largest Sunni bloc in parliament. "The miserable fact is that most of the hospitals are controlled by these militias."

Qasim Yahya, a spokesman for the health minister, said he had never heard accusations that Sunnis have been taken from hospitals by Shiite militias or Iraqi security forces.

"We are the Health Ministry for all of Iraq. Not for Sunnis, not for Shiites. For everyone," Yahya said. "If a car bomb explosion takes place, do we ask who is Sunni or Shiite? No. We treat all victims, regardless of who they are or what sect they are."

Sahib al-Amiri, a leader in the Sadr movement, said: "These things that are being said in the Baghdad street are untrue. The Mahdi Army's only role is to fight the Sunni insurgents and protect the Shiites."

But the relatives of Sunni hospital patients tell a different story. In the case of Mounthir Abbas Saud, a trip to a hospital set off a chain of events that sparked an ongoing six-month-old drama in which two of his cousins are dead and two more are missing.

It started with cigarettes. As Saud strolled down a street in the Karrada district on Feb. 27 to buy a pack, a powerful car bomb wrenched his right arm off his body, ripped off much of his face and sprayed shrapnel into his lower intestines.

His prognosis was grim. Saud could breathe only with a tube that needed to be cleaned several times an hour. His family flocked to Ibn al-Nafis to watch over him.

Two weeks later, as Saud's cousin Hazim Aboud Saud returned to the hospital after a trip to buy medication for his wounded relative, he saw the facility surrounded by militiamen carrying machine guns, the family said. He watched as the gunmen removed the still severely wounded cousin from the building -- just dragging him on the ground instead of using a stretcher, his family said. The militia members loaded Saud, his brother Khodair and a cousin, Adil Aboud Saud, into an ambulance and drove away.

"They were screaming, 'We haven't done anything wrong! Why are you doing this?' " said Abu Nasr. "They begged the men to at least take care of my wounded cousin properly."

A few days later, Mounthir's bullet-riddled body was discovered in Sadr City, a Shiite slum controlled by the Mahdi Army. His mouth was stuffed with dirt.

When militiamen discovered that one of the cousins, Hazim Saud, a 32-year-old taxi driver, had witnessed the abductions, they quickly kidnapped him, his family said. His body was found March 27 with his hands -- broken and blue from apparent beatings -- bound behind his back and a plastic bag over his head. The death certificate said he had been suffocated.

But the family held out hope that the two men seized with Mounthir Saud -- Khodair and Adil Saud -- were still alive. When another cousin, Haithem Ali Abbas, a judge in Baghdad, received a call from the Shiite-controlled Interior Ministry that they had been located, he hurried to the ministry's headquarters to pick them up. He was shot to death by unknown gunmen shortly after he arrived.

The suffering extends even to those who now wouldn't dare enter a hospital. Abu Youssef, a cousin of Mounthir Saud who has a pea-size tumor in his right foot, now walks with a limp and acute pain because he is petrified to see a doctor. Another relative with a condition that causes overproduction of blood cells won't go for his normal treatments anymore.

On a recent weekday morning, Abu Nasr sat in a quiet restaurant in central Baghdad and pulled out a crumpled envelope filled with death certificates and photographs of his recently killed relatives. Sighing heavily and staring frequently at the dirty ground, he said he prayed that someone would rescue the country from the sectarian violence that is ravaging it.

"We don't care whether the government is Shiite, Sunni, American or Iranian. All we want is security and safety," he said. "But no one in the government represents that now."

When asked whether Iraq has already descended into civil war, he said: "Of course. All the Shiites want to do is kill all the Sunnis."

"What is going to happen to us?" he said as he clutched a tiny photo of his dead cousin Mounthir. "What is going to happen to this country?"

(Special correspondent Saad Sarhan in Najaf and other Washington Post staff in Iraq contributed to this report.)


4. In war's dust, a new Arab 'lion' emerges
Hizbullah's Nasrallah is hailed as a regional hero.
By Dan Murphy (from The Christian Science Monitor)

CAIRO –To most of the Arab public, the debate over who won the war between Israel and Lebanon's Hizbullah is already settled.

Hizbullah leader Hassan Nasrallah is being feted through song in Syrian nightclubs and on Palestinian radio. In Egypt, his name is being given to babies. On Baghdad streets, posters celebrate his "victory." Islamist and secular groups are united in declaring Mr. Nasrallah the new "lion" of Arab causes. The long-term political fallout of this euphoria over Hizbullah's ability to withstand Israel's superior firepower is still uncertain. In Lebanon, suffering brought by the war has seen support for Hizbullah split along sectarian lines. But there are signs that opponents of authoritarian regimes in the region have been emboldened by Hizbullah's actions, linking their struggles against their own states to the Lebanese guerrillas' fight with Israel.

What's more, the perception of Nasrallah as the Arabs' new champion - replacing secular leaders of the past like Yasser Arafat - has accelerated the regional shift of support to Islamist leaders seen as less corrupt than their secular counterparts.

The biggest boost to Nasrallah's popularity appears to be among Palestinians and Syrians.

Alaa Abul Heijah, the leader of Firkat Ishaman, a band in the West Bank city of Jenin, says that he decided to write a tribute to Nasrallah after watching footage of Israel's attack on the village of Qana. The result was a song that dubs Nasrallah "the Hawk of Lebanon," and has quickly become one of the more popular war songs.

In Damascus, posters of Nasrallah with young children or of Nasrallah flanked by Syrian President Bashar al-Assad and Iranian President Mahmoud Ahamdinejad, adorn shops and cars. Singers have even brought the "resistance" into popular nightclubs where alcohol flows and Syrians dance to popular songs found throughout the Arab world.

To be sure, Sunni Syrians and Palestinians aren't necessarily enamored of the hard-line Shiite alliance of Iran and Hizbullah. Some see them as outsiders who use the Palestinian cause to further their own interests. Abdel Majid Sweilem, a political-science professor at Al Quds University in Jerusalem, says many Palestinians feel caught in the middle of the Iran-US standoff. "We don't want to be in the Iranian coalition, but we don't want to be involved in the American'" one either, says Mr. Sweilem.

But for most Palestinians, little seems to dampen their elation at what's perceived as a victory against Israel through mere survival. Omar Shaban, a Gaza-based political analyst, says Hizbullah's endurance is the closest thing Arabs have had to a victory against Israel in decades. Nasrallah "is an example of a leader who Palestinians are dreaming of," says Mr. Shaban.

That's a feeling shared by many Arabs. "He is the first leader to really defeat Israel. He does not live in palaces or drive a Mercedes. He lives with the fighters and the people," says Mahmoud Mahrouf, a high school teacher in Cairo. "Nasrallah is the only true Arab leader today."

While much of the visible support falls into the category of Arab kitsch, there are signs that Nasrallah's rise in the region will translate to a boost for opponents of the US and Israel.

According to a recent article by Saad Eddin Ibrahim, chairman of Cairo's Ibn Khaldun Center, a postwar poll by his think tank found that Nasrallah is ranked the most "important" regional leader by Egyptians. Rounding out the top five, in order, are: Iranian President Mahmoud Ahamdinejad, Khalid Mishal of Hamas, Osama bin Laden, and the Muslim Brotherhood's Mahdi Akef.

During the war, Mahdi Akef, the Supreme Guide of the Muslim Brotherhood, the country's most popular opposition movement, made comments of almost unprecedented militancy for an organization that laid down its arms a generation ago.

Pressured by eager young followers, he said the Brotherhood was "ready" to send 10,000 members to fight alongside Hizbullah, and he followed that up with a thinly veiled attack on Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak, accusing "Arab leaders" of abandoning Lebanon to "Israeli aggression."

"If [the Arab leaders] weren't Muslims, we would have killed them, because they are a bigger threat to the nation than Israel itself," Mr. Akef said. His tough talk has been followed by a crackdown; 17 Brotherhood members were arrested last Friday.

Close US allies like Egypt and Saudi Arabia have taken heat from their citizens for not standing with Hizbullah during the war.

While praise remains near unanimous outside Lebanon, recent polling shows more mixed feelings about Nasrallah's militia. A poll released Monday by L'Orien Le Jour, conducted by Ipsos-stat, found that while 84 percent of Lebanese Shiites want Hizbullah to remain armed, 54 percent of Sunnis and 77 percent of Christians want the group disarmed.

(With reporting by Joshua Mitnick in Jenin, West Bank, and Rhonda Roumani in Damascus, Syria.)


5. Islamists: the tough move from guns to governance -- by Rami G. Khouri (from Beirut’s Daily Star staff)

The Arab world's two leading self-styled "Islamic resistance movements" - Hizbullah in Lebanon and Hamas in Palestine - seem to be moving in different directions, but there are lessons to be learned from both. The main one is that armed resistance is primarily a means for these groups. Their ultimate goal is a national order that reflects their society's valid concerns on political legitimacy, sovereignty, ideology and social values. Above all, their success reflects their ability to respond to the real needs of their constituents, rather than to promote any sort of ideal Islamic society or espouse revolutionary rhetoric and wage perpetual war.

As Hizbullah holds its own in Lebanon and the region, it also finds itself preoccupied with the challenges of shifting its center of gravity - or at least its international image - from guns to governance. After achieving the two striking feats of driving the Israeli Army out of South Lebanon in 2000 and fighting it to a draw in 2006, it has no room left for military endeavors, and nothing more to prove on the battlefield.

It asserted itself in recent years by defying five parties: a weak Lebanese central government; other Lebanese political groups; Israel; the United States; and the dominant regimes in the Arab world. In return, these forces have now physically and politically hemmed it in. The Israeli Army will destroy all Lebanon after the next provocation; the Lebanese government has moved 15,000 soldiers to the South; the UN Security Council will dispatch another 15,000 international peacekeepers; and Lebanese and Arab political leaders want Hizbullah to engage and integrate fully into the national governance and security system.

History suggests that fighting resistance wars to liberate one's occupied land is much more straightforward than making a subsequent transition to political responsibility. Hizbullah's most important test is just starting: it must dissipate the haze of its inscrutability, remove the ambiguity of its relations with Iran and Syria, and slay the demons of mistrust that plague its relations with many key players, especially inside Lebanon. It can do this and retain its integrity and impact, but only if it applies the same serious operating principles politically that it has applied in recent years militarily and socially - and in terms of its focus, courage and efficiency.

The parallel lessons from Palestine are instructive and sobering. The Palestinian national resistance movement against Zionism and Western powers since the 1930s has passed through erratic stages of success and failure. The Fatah-dominated Palestinian Liberation Organization made some major political achievements regionally and globally in the 1970s and 1980s, only to sink into complacency, corruption and incompetence after 1990. This ultimately led to its marginalization and the political and physical destruction of many aspects of Palestinian society.
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Three key responses to this institutional mediocrity and political failure were the rise of Hamas and smaller Islamist groups, the waging of two grassroots and largely spontaneous popular intifadas against Israeli occupation, and the fragmentation of society into local political-military wards, militias and gangs. Hamas' success in resisting Israel militarily ultimately helped drive Israel out of Gaza. Hamas achieved parallel political success in winning local and national elections in 2005-2006.

Hamas' overall trajectory, however, has been more difficult than Hizbullah's. This is mainly because it has fought simultaneously a brutal Israeli military, Fatah, Arab governments that fear its ilk, and the US and Europe who have tried to break it through sanctions and other means. Yet Hamas has also performed poorly in many cases, unable to build on the credibility and legitimacy it has achieved since its founding less than two decades ago.

A respected member of Hamas in Gaza has now publicly admonished his fellow ruling Islamists and other Palestinians for their failures, charging that "Gaza is suffering under the yoke of anarchy and the swords of thugs," and since Israel's withdrawal from Gaza a year ago, "life became a nightmare and an intolerable burden."

These sentiments were published in an article Sunday by Ghazi Hamad, a former Hamas newspaper editor and the spokesman for the current Hamas government. He urged Palestinians to examine their own performance and not blame Israel for all their problems and failures, though he also seemed to place most of the blame on assorted Fatah-linked armed groups in Gaza. His most important point was his insistence on "self-criticism and self-evaluation," instead of the habit of "blaming our mistakes on others."

Hamas has been through tough moments before, including assassinations of its leaders, mass deportations and jailings of its members, as well as the current political and economic boycott by Israel, the US and Europe. In light of the lessons of Hizbullah's performance in Lebanon, Hamas must now adjust quickly or risk the same self-inflicted fate as Fatah and the PLO.

As Hamad aptly challenged it and Palestinian society to do, Hamas needs to examine its own ways in order to achieve success by being more accountable to its constituents, rather than faithful to fiery or emotional slogans. The performances of Hizbullah and Hamas in the months ahead are worth monitoring, for they will impact greatly on political trends throughout the Arab world.

(Rami G. Khouri writes a regular commentary for The Daily Star)