For today

A few things:

1. Yesterday was my birthday, celebrated with Cuban, Dominican and Nicaraguan cigars, as well as quite a bit of good old fashioned socializing. If you didn’t know, I share my birthday with Fidel Castro. Ain’t that something?

2. G. Djerejian has an interesting post at The Belgravia Dispatch about VP Cheney’s eagerness to launch air strikes against Iran, mostly decrying the VP as “a dangerous man” and his Iranian wet-dreams as an exercise in “strategic blundering”. While I am not as skeptical of Iran’s involvement in Iran as Djerejian is, I share his belief that an American attack on Iran would incredibly dangerous (and probably more dangerous than the invasion of Iraq has proven to be), well outside the bounds of what could be named the “national interest”, and so fundamentally base at the very roots of its reasoning that it could very well prove to be in the short term phyrrich victory (as the Americans would surely be able to bomb out whatever they pleased that was not well hidden, but the resulting Iranian response would probably spark a regional if not world war). My worry is that the American media, as always in times preceding wars, is and will be all too receptive of the possibility of an American attack on Iran (the ones Djerejian refers to are air strikes on al-Qods/IRGC training camps, whom Washington accuses of funding and arming the Iraqi insurgency; G.D. for his part references a Financial Times article states that the insurgency is overwhelmingly Iraqi and that those fighters who are from abroad come from Sunni allied states and not Iran, and most importantly that “he lethal roadside bombs with shaped charges that US officials have coated with a spurious veneer of sophistication to prove Iranian provenance are mostly made by Iraqi army-trained engineers – from high explosive looted from those unsecured arms dumps”; this also speaks to the terrible problem the Americans have with “losing track” of some 190,000 weapons (which I would call nothing short of an outrage; the world does not need anymore stateless AK-47s), some of which are ending up on the streets of Lebanon, in the hands of would be militiamen.). In any event, the list of possible Iranian responses he provides is valuable. Americans often see themselves as a kind of Teflon Nation; what happens there rarely impacts the slacker with a game controller in his hand and there are rarely consequences for American misdeeds. Well, as the Americans see in Iraq, things are not always so easy. It is easy to kick down a door, but difficult to establish order within. Such a strike might well end up costing more American lives than it avenges or saves. Not to mention that unless the Americans either bomb out the country entirely, or force regime change, those training camps can always be rebuilt.

3. The NYT ran a rather terrible piece about the Metn by-election last week on the 10th. The piece utterly ignored Lebanese internal dynamics in favor of describing the Middle East-wide phenomena in which American-backed electoral candidates rarely win.

The paradox of American policy in the Middle East — promoting democracy on the assumption it will bring countries closer to the West — is that almost everywhere there are free elections, the American-backed side tends to lose.

This is usually true. However, in Lebanon, things are different. The Lebanese love patronage, whether it be from France, Syria, Israel (yes, Israel), Iran, Russia, Saudi Arabia, or the United States. Their political elites live off of the stuff. But the piece is entirely wrong by stating that

Lebanon’s voters in the Metn district, in other words, appeared to have joined the Palestinians, who voted for Hamas; the Iraqis, who voted for a government sympathetic to Iran; and the Egyptians, who have voted in growing numbers in recent elections for the Islamist Muslim Brotherhood. “No politician can afford to identify with the West because poll after poll shows people don’t believe in the U.S. agenda,” said Mustafa Hamarneh, until recently the director of the Center for Strategic Studies at the University of Jordan. Mr. Hamarneh is running for a seat in Jordan’s Parliament in November, but he says he has made a point of keeping his campaign focused locally, and on bread-and-butter issues. “If somebody goes after you as pro-American he can hurt you,” he said.

I don’t think that Gemayel’s loss had much to do with the troubles that Mr. Hamarneh is facing. I also wouldn’t put Camille Khouri and the Free Patriotic Movement in the same category as Hamas or the Muslim Brothers. Not least because Metn is primarily Christian — and Maronite at that — but also because if the writer had cared to follow the campaign closely enough, he would have seen that Gemayel simply followed flawed strategy. He relied too heavily on the feudal nature of politics in the region — the Gemayel clan is one of the staple clans of Lebanon’s medieval political system — and alienated or simply failed to persuade key voting blocks, such as the district’s Armenians and Greek Orthodox. Further, the author seems to place Gemayel in the same category as other “Arab liberals”. For one thing, his party — the Phalange/Kataeb — is anything but liberal. It an expressly Maronite political organization founded on sectarians, for sectarianism, and with the best interests not of “all Lebanese” but of that community (not unlike most Lebanese parties). Furthermore, for him to say that “Lebanon’s Christians” are generally more pro-American than other Arabs (better not let a Phoenician read that!) is kind of funny. If he means Maronites, this is usually true. A large percentage (if not most) of the Maronites in Metn voted for Gemayel, while other communities were either split or voted for Khouri. “Gemayel garnered 56.3 percent of Maronite votes in Metn, while Khoury got 79.8 percent of Armenian votes and 57.6 percent of Orthodox Christians’ votes.” The piece is framed as if those who did not vote for Gemayel were voting for Hezb Allah (with whom the FPM is allied at the present time)! (Khouri did get 97.4% of the Shiite vote; Shiites and Muslims generally are in the minority in Metn.) The entire article seems to imply that not voting for an American-backed candidate is voting for anti-American one, or is being anti-American. It isn’t. There are other factors at work. Indeed, in 2005, the FPM (Khouri’s party) won far more votes in Metn than this time; one could draw the conclusion that this last election showed that the FPM is becoming less popular than previously, which might have even made it more interesting. What is interesting is that in the DS (linked above), it is said that

“In 2005 they [the Maronites] went with Aoun because, at the time, he represented their aspirations and because Aoun was opposed to the four-party electoral alliance [that grouped Christian and Muslim parties],” Saad said.

Aoun lost a significant number of Christian votes as his rhetoric changed from using confessional terms to a more nationalist tone and as March 14 Forces accused Aoun of aligning the FPM with Syrian and Iranian interests. FPM candidate Camille Khoury’s majority among Christian voters in the Metn was 79 votes – he won the polls by a paper-thin margin of 418 votes.

While in most other Arabic-speaking countries, being pro-American is a “kiss of death”, as one of the article’s Saudi reformers puts it, in Lebanon it is not. Having a patron can enhance a candidate’s standing, even if it is an American, lest ye be in some parts of the South or southern Beirut, the strong holds of Hezb Allah and whatnot. The article does mention internal issues, more so that Americans ought not to support parties but rather institutions. Nevertheless, the notion that Gemayel’s failure can be tied to his backing by the United States is at best erroneous. As David Kenner put it: “Lebanon’s Christian community consistently and overwhelmingly says that they have a favorable impression of the United States. In the latest Pew poll on the subject, 82% of Christians said that they had a favorable view of the United States.” While it is an important dynamic throughout the Middle East, often including many of Lebanon’s electoral contests, this was not one in which the American factor was as pivotal as the NYT paints it. The issue is more complicated than that. I won’t say that NYT or the author were “too lazy or too dishonest” to take a deeper look at the by-election, but whoever wishes to ought to.