I am really excited about this development. I've been trying for a while to figure out a way to escape Amazon's large and greedy clutch, and I think this is it.

... But later in the current month, just as soon as we have the final text of Miko Peled's much-acclaimed General's Son, all hands in the company will be turned to getting that text excellently and beautifully transformed into the book we have all been waiting for!

I hope all JWN readers have seen the excerpts from the Foreword that Alice Walker has contributed to Miko's book, that we published over at the JWB website last week?

Anyway, I'm really happy that I can take copies of our great existing titles up to the PennBDS conference in Philly this weekend.

I really appreciate everything my readers here can do to help get the word out about Just World Books... and to encourage your friends, students, and colleagues to buy our books! I realize the process of browsing and buying the books will still be a little chaotic, until we have finished the process of consolidating all our products over at our own webstore. But you just need to remember two things:

1. The best way to find out how to buy the version you want, of the book you want, if you're not sure, is to click on the yellow "Buy" button on the book's page on JWB's home website. That will tell you what your options, and give you click-through access to the relevant sales page(s); and

2. If you're still confused, or if you want to place a bulk order or a complicated order, or have other questions, know that our customer-service operation is now working pretty well. We have a toll-free number, posted on the website-- though honestly, you'll do better if you send us an email to "sales-at-justworldbooks.com".

The ADL--yes, folks, that is supposed to be the Anti Defamation League-- recently described me on their website as "an anti-Israel writer, publisher and the former executive director of the Council for the National Interest, an organization that regularly sends delegations of its supporters to meet with Hamas and Hezbollah representatives in the Middle East... " How's that again?

Never mind that in a career spanning 38 years, I spent precisely four months working for CNI... or that, on the one CNI trip I helped organize we spent a lot of time with Israelis of a variety of viewpoints, and even made a special visit to the Knesset... Or that in the course of my career I have extensively interviewed Israeli government ministers, military leaders, and analysts (as the folks from the 'Anti'-Defamation League might know if they ever, er, actually read any of the many books and articles I have written... )

No, instead of doing any research that might involve, you know, actual facts, they just jumped on this rather seedy (but no doubt well-funded) little defamation bandwagon that a bunch of scared "Israel-right-or-wrong" types have been gunning up...

And they recycle an extremely tired (and fallacious) little piece of defamation that appeared somewhere else not long ago, which completely mischaracterized some thing I said at Georgetown University in late January 2009.

Actually, my own contemporaneous (or very near to contemporaneous) account of that incident can be read on this JWN post, that I published on January 25, 2009.

Here is just the beginning of that blog post:

One notable thing that happened at our panel discussion on Gaza, at Georgetown University Thursday night, was that a young Israeli student directed a question at me asking why I had said that "all Israelis are stupid"-- and also asserting that her country had had "no choice" but to launch the war on Gaza.

I replied that I had never said "all Israelis" are stupid-- though I had certainly pointed out the counter-productive nature, from every point of view, of the decision her country's government had made to launch the most recent war; and I'd pointed out too, with some sadness, that that decision seemed to have received high levels of support from Jewish Israelis.

But certainly not from all of them-- as I had also pointed out in my main presentation.

What I'd referred to specifically was this extremely insightful (and courageous) article, published on December 31 in the WaPo by a Jewish Israeli social-work lecturer called Julia Chaitin. Chaitin, by the way, lives in southern Israel so has a deep understanding of the concerns and fears of the people who live there...

They are truly pathetic. People: You don't control the discourse any more because in the era of the intertubes you can't control the discourse any more! Deal with it. Palestinians-- like Iraqis, Lebanese people, Syrians, Egyptians, Israelis and everyone on God's earth, today get to speak about truth of their situations without the heavy hand of the Zionist discourse-suppression organizations ('Camera', 'Flame', 'Stand With Us', etc) being able to suffocate us.

You know, for six years after the Israeli military swept into and occupied the whole of Egypt's Sinai Peninsula in 1967, the generals (okay, most of them, but not Gen Matti Peled, as his son Miko reminds us in his great upcoming memoir) thought their control of Sinai was assured by the defensive line of forts, ramparts, and fortifications they had thrown up along the Suez Canal... That was the "Bar-Lev Line"... And imagining themselves quite secure behind it they started building (quite illegally, as always) settlements in different spots in the large Sinai Peninsula...

But in October 1973, it took the Egyptian military just a few hours to fatally breach the Bar-Lev Line in a number of places. This, from Wikipedia today:

Within the first hour of the war, the Egyptian engineering corps tackled the sand barrier. Seventy engineer groups, each one responsible for opening a single passage, worked from wooden boats. With hoses attached to water pumps, they began attacking the sand obstacle. Many breaches occurred within two to three hours of the onset of operations — according to schedule; engineers at several places, however, experienced unexpected problems... The Third Army, in particular, had difficulty in its sector. There, the clay proved resistant to high-water pressure and, consequently, the engineers experienced delays in their breaching. Engineers in the Second Army completed the erection of their bridges and ferries within nine hours, whereas Third Army needed more than sixteen hours...

And here's a big shoutout to MuzzleWatch, Mondoweiss, Max Blumenthal, and everyone else who's made a big difference in all of this!

But over there at the 'Anti'-Defamation League and in those other discourse suppression networks, I guess leaders and staffers have their own (highly inflated) salaries they need to justify, and fundraising appeals they need to crank up... So there they go, desperately trying to heap more sand into the breaches and recreate the Maginot Line Bar Lev Line of their imagined security.

As I said, the sight would almost be amusing... if it did not also involve a prolongation of this illegally lengthy Israeli occupation of Palestine with all the desperate human suffering that involves.

He writes,

Governments that exclude foreign journalists at times of crisis such as Iran and (until the last week) Syria, create a vacuum of information easily filled by their enemies. These are far better equipped to provide their own version of events than they used to be before the development of mobile phones, satellite television and the internet. State monopolies of information can no longer be maintained. But simply because the opposition to the Syrian and Iranian governments have taken over the news agenda does not mean that what they say is true.

Early last year I met some Iranian stringers for Western publications in Tehran whose press credentials had been temporarily suspended by the authorities. I said this must be frustrating them, but they replied that even if they could file stories – saying nothing much was happening – they would not be believed by their editors. These had been convinced by exile groups, using blogs and carefully selected YouTube footage, that Tehran was visibly seething with discontent. If the local reporters said that this was a gross exaggeration, their employers would suspect that had been intimidated or bought off by Iranian security.

... [T]echnical advances have made it more difficult for governments to hide repression. But these developments have also made the work of the propagandist easier. Of course, people who run newspapers and radio and television stations are not fools. They know the dubious nature of much of the information they are conveying. The political elite in Washington and Europe was divided for and against the US invasion of Iraq, making it easier for individual journalists to dissent. But today there is an overwhelming consensus in the foreign media that the rebels are right and existing governments wrong. For institutions such as the BBC, highly unbalanced coverage becomes acceptable.

Sadly, al-Jazeera, which has done so much to shatter state control of information in the Middle East since it was set up in 1996, has become the uncritical propaganda arm of the Libyan and Syrian rebels.

The Syrian opposition needs to give the impression that its insurrection is closer to success than it really is. The Syrian government has failed to crush the protesters, but they, in turn, are a long way from overthrowing it. The exiled leadership wants Western military intervention in its favour as happened in Libya, although conditions are very different.

The purpose of manipulating the media coverage is to persuade the West and its Arab allies that conditions in Syria are approaching the point when they can repeat their success in Libya. Hence the fog of disinformation pumped out through the internet.

In my view, the Syrian opposition consists of a number of elements, some of them extremely contradictory with each other. There is a genuine, in-country network of activists who seek real democratic reform and who're working for it using mass nonviolent organizing. But there are also all kinds of opportunistic networks piggybacking on that movement, most of them based in or directed from outside the country... Among them are the openly violence-using people of the Free Syria Army. And though some people in the exile-based Syrian National Council claim that the role of the FSA is merely to "station armed people around mass demonstrations in order to protect the demonstrations", that has never been a tactic endorsed by any genuine nonviolent mass movement. Indeed it is tactic that's almost guaranteed to escalate the situation and cause far more casualties among the unarmed than if only nonviolent moral suasion/reproach is brought to bear on the regime's forces.

We should not kid ourselves by imagining that there is no opportunistic exploitation of the Syrian situation underway, being undertaken by a whole range of anti-Damascus forces-- some sectarian (as in the case of Qatar or Saudi Arabia; also, quite possibly, Turkey), and some pro-Zionist, or anyway easily exploited by Syria's longterm opponents in the Zionist movement in Israel and in the 'west'.

So how do those many western 'liberals' who seem to be so deeply invested in supporting the Syrian 'revolutionaries' fit into this scheme? To me, this is another key part of the puzzle, along with the enlistment by the 'revolutionaries' of so much of the western media, as documented by Patrick Cockburn.

Okay, I understand that the Syrian government has a really lousy human rights record. I have worked long enough (38 years) in and on the affairs of the mashreq to understand that better than probably 95% of the people in the human rights movement who currently present themselves as "experts" on Syria. But is getting out there to advocate a "Libya-style" overthrow of the regime (i.e. with the aid of outside forces) really a good way to bring rights abuses to an end?

No it is not! Wars and civil conflicts everywhere and always involve a mass-scale assault on the rights of civilian residents of the war-zones, with the most vulnerable residents being the ones whose rights (including the right to life) get abused the worst.

That is everywhere and always the case. No exceptions. That is why I am always really dismayed and upset when I see rights activists who claim to understand what they are talking about taking actions that escalate the tensions toward outright civil conflict and war... Remember that in the case of most rights activists who live in comfortable, secure western countries: These people have never had direct experience of living in a war zone. They are bombarded (by the military-industrial complex) with arguments that modern warfare can be a "precision", "surgical" business... and most recently, in Libya, we saw the emergence of the keffiyah-ed warrior racing through the sand as a figure of popular heroism and adulation. (Lawrence of Arabia, anyone?).

I have lived in a war zone. I lived in Lebanon from 1974 through 1981. In six of those years the country was plagued by civil war. I lived within Lebanese society, being married to a Lebanese citizen. I was not a "visiting fireman", as many western journos were-- parachuting in to stay a few days or weeks in a relatively comfortable hotel from time to time. Everyone involved in fighting the Lebanese civil war, from all the multiple "sides" that were engaged in it, was convinced of the justice of his (or sometimes her) cause. Each one was fighting what he knew to be a "just" war... But the war and its associated atrocities ground on and on and on.

Another thing the western rights activists too often forget: Mass-scale atrocities-- as opposed to a rampage by a lone, psychotic gunman-- are nearly always, or always, committed only in the context of an ongoing civil conflict or war. Conflicts provide the heightened degree of threat and the dehumanization of the opponent that are essential ingredients in the organized commission of atrocities. They also, in the past, provided plenty of the "fog of war" in which those acts can be shrouded.

Thus, if you want to avoid the commission of atrocities: avoid war! Do everything you can to explore and enlarge the space for de-escalation and the negotiated resolution of grievances!

It is true that modern communications technology makes the shrouding of atrocities much harder (though not impossible) to achieve. That is, obviously, a very good thing! But this same technology also enables the fighting parties of all sides to do much more than they could previously, to frame and disseminate their own "stories" of what's happening... Rights activists in other countries need to be very aware that this is not only a possibility-- it is actually happening. And in the case of Syria, in particular, these reports are being used to whip up western (and worldwide) support for a 'western'-led military campaign aimed at bringing forced regime change to Syria.

Colonialists have, throughout history, always tried to cloak their campaigns of military intervention, domination, and control in the lingo of "rights", "progress", and liberalism. Even the Belgians and their supporters, when they entered Congo in the late 1800s to initiate an era of control that was marked throughout by mass killings, mass enslavement, and outright genocide that within 23 years took the lives of some ten million persons indigenous to the area... did so in the name of a campaign sold tothe European publics as being one aimed at "liberating" the people of Congo from other (in truth, much less maleficent) Arab slave-traders.

We liberals need to be very careful indeed that we do not have our admirable sentiments of human solidarity abused by today's architects of 'western' colonial invasion, control, and domination.

The situation that Syria's people are living through today is extremely difficult. There are no easy answers. Both the regime and the opposition have demonstrated their resilience, and neither looks as though it is about to "win" the current contest any time soon. Given the degree of tension that now exists in Syrian society (due to the actions of the regime, of some portions of the opposition, and of several outside actors), it is hard to see how to simply ramp those tensions down and open up the space for the inter-Syrian dialogue and reform process that the people of Syria so desperately need...

But what kind of future do those of us who are westerners or other kinds of non-Syrians want to see for our friends in Syria? A future like that of today's Libya-- or even, heaven forfend, another "result" of western military action: today's Iraq? Or would we want them to follow a negotiated-transition path like that taken by the people of South Africa, 1990-94... or the negotiated-transition path that the people of Myanmar/Burma now seem to be taking? Few of those western liberals and rights activists who are baying for "no-fly zones" or other forms of foreign military intervention seem to have ever thought about this question, so convinced are they of their own righteousness and the infallibility of their own judgments, however scantily informed these judgments may be in an era of instant You-Tube uploads of videos of, as Patrick Cockburn noted, often extremely sketchy provenance or representativity.

(Jon is also working on another book, which will be a study of the massacres themselves. In the meantime, he has written a fab new preface to the 1983 book, explaining to a new generation of peace-and-justice activists the significance of all those events... )

These days, "Sabra" is also the trade-name of one of the two brands of Israeli-related hummus that BDS activists are boycotting. In the case of Sabra hummus, the boycott is based primarily on the fact that the Strauss Group, an Israeli-owned company that owns half of the brand, has had a long history of giving material support to the Golani Brigade, an Israeli military formation associated with numerous grave rights abuses.

I'm thinking that maybe this year in particular, the BDS folks might start calling the hummus brand "Sabra and Shatila hummus", to make even clearer the connection between the hummus brand and the excesses/atrocities committed by, or under the close supervision of, the Israeli military....

I've also been thinking about the meanings, connotations, and expropriations of the term "Sabra" in general. In Arabic, the most common understanding of the triliteral root S-b-r relates to being patient and long-suffering. The root is also used in the common name that many Arabs, including Palestinians, give to the prickly pear/ "Indian fig", and its fruit. It has also been thus used in modern Hebrew. (I don't know about ancient Hebrew.)

And then, in modern-day Israel, the term "Sabra" was introduced to refer to those Jewish Israelis who had actually been born in the country-- as opposed to that proportion of them, originally very large, who arrived from elsewhere as colonial settlers inside the land. Indeed, the use of the term "Sabra" in that context merely underlined the fact that for so many Jewish Israelis, being born in the country was not the norm.

For Palestinians, meanwhile, the hardy prickly-pear (Subar) hedges that once ringed or demarcated properties in many traditional villages in historic Palestine over time became, in many cases, the only trace left of where once had stood those villages that in 1947-48 were ethnically cleansed by the advancing Jewish/Israeli armies that pushed the boundaries of the state of Israel far beyond what even the very generous U.N. Partition Plan had allotted to it. You can still drive around many parts of Israel today and see, on a small rise here or in the fold of valley there, a neglected and ragged line of prickly pear hedges; and you'll know that that was where one of the ethnically cleansed villages stood.

Patient, indeed.

But the word "Sabra" in one form or another has also been used as a family name in many Arab families, as has the family name "Shatila". In Beirut, the Chatilas/Shatilas have long been one of the big Sunni trading families... So I imagine the names of the two refugee camps established in southwest Beirut in 1948-50 came from the names of the owners of the lands on which the U.N. and the Lebanese government agreed to locate those camps.

The refugees housed in those camps, as in the three dozen other large refugee camps that ringed the area of the State of Israel, then and now, were some of those same Palestinians who'd been ethnically cleansed from those now destroyed but still "Subar"-hedged villages inside the area of Mandate Palestine.

The massacres at Sabra and Shatila were committed, as noted above, by extremist-Maronite militia formations who were acting under the close supervision of, and with much logistical support from, the Israeli military. (This coordination was well represented in the haunting 2008 film from Israeli director Ari Folman, "Waltz with Bashir.") The key architect of the whole episode, as of the extremely lethal, all-out military assault on Lebanon that preceded it, from June through early August of 1982, was Ariel Sharon. Israel's own investigation into the massacres, conducted by former Supreme Court Justice Yitzhak Kahan, found that Sharon bore personal responsibility for the massacres, and recommended that he not be permitted to hold high office again.

Well, we know how that went, don't we...

So now, here we are, 30 years after the Israeli assault on Lebanon, 30 years after the massacres at Sabra and Shatila, and the Palestinian refugees in Lebanon and elsewhere are still no closer to having their rights restored. Their communities were expelled from their ancestral homes and lands through the use of violence and force, and were subsequently prevented from returning to those lands by the same force. They have been subject to repeated assaults by the arrogant Israeli military (with the Golani Brigade as one of the most violent and aggressive units in it.) And they've have been forced to continue living as stateless refugees for 64 years now, though numerous United Nations resolutions assure them of the right to "return or compensation" (in UNGA resolution 194, and reaffirmed in numerous U.N. resolutions since then), or, more simply, as per the 1948 Universal Declaration of Human Rights, the "right to ... return to his [or her] country."

So maybe if we start calling "Sabra" hummus "Sabra and Shatila" hummus, it might remind American shoppers of some of this history?

(What I would not want to do, however, is stigmatize the use of the term "Shatila" in a brand name. The Dearborn, Michigan-based Shatila Food Products bakery produces the very best baklava there is in the whole of North America... )

Alterman is quite right to note that by far the most important thing that's happening in Egypt right now is not the confrontations or lack of them in Cairo's very visible Tahrir Square but the electoral process that is unfolding, with almost painful slowness, all around the country-- and the negotiation that will subsequently unfold between the election's victors and the country's now-ruling military council, the SCAF.

(The piece doesn't mention the SCAF's recent actions against US-funded NGOs in the country. That was probably because it was written a few days ago. But anyway, his basic thesis that it is the election and the subsequent negotiation that are the most important story, still stands.)

He is also right to note that the Islamist parties that between them are now showing a clear lead in the elections are doing so for good reason-- because they have built up serious, nationwide political organizations. He writes:

Islamists have grasped that the game has moved beyond protests to the mechanics of elections, and their supporters are motivated, organized and energetic. By contrast, the secular liberal parties are virtually absent from the countryside. Judging from posters, billboards, bumper stickers and banners, the two major Islamist parties have the field almost to themselves.

Why does Alterman need to make it seem as though only he understands what is really going on? (And isn't he an American, too? Or has he, like Michael Oren, suddenly transformed himself into an Israeli?)

Well, that is a relatively small quibble. The more serious problems occur at the end of his piece, where he writes:

Many in Israel and America, and even some in Egypt, fear that the elections will produce an Islamist-led government that will tear up the Egyptian-Israeli peace treaty, turn hostile to the United States, openly support Hamas and transform Egypt into a theocracy that oppresses women, Christians and secular Muslims. They see little prospect for more liberal voices to prevail, and view military dictatorship as a preferable outcome.

American interests, however, call for a different outcome, one that finds a balance — however uneasy — between the military authorities and Egypt’s new politicians. We do not want any one side to vanquish or silence the other. And with lopsided early election results, it is especially important that the outcome not drive away Egypt’s educated liberal elite, whose economic connections and know-how will be vital for attracting investment and creating jobs.

Our instinct is to search for the clarity we saw in last winter’s televised celebrations. However, what Egyptians, and Americans, need is something murkier — not a victory, but an accommodation.

As someone who claims to be a knowledgeable, evidence-based "realist" rather than an alarmist, wouldn't that be information Alterman should include in that paragraph, rather than letting those "scare" scenarios simply stand?

Moving on to the last two paras of his piece... I feel pretty sure that Alterman would define "American interests" in a way that is in some portions the same and in some portions different from the way that I would define "the true interests of the American people". However, let's assume we're talking here about roughly the same thing. In my definition the true interests of the American people would require that our government and all its appendages, including its sneakily misnamed, government-funded quangos like NED, etc, stay completely out of Egyptian politics, and take only those actions toward Egypt that are clearly requested by the new government that will emerge from the ongoing electoral process.

Realistically, that government will only emerge and stabilize itself once presidential elections in April, as well as the current lengthy round of parliamentary elections, have been completed. But the parliament that emerges from the current elections will have a leadership that will be in a position to negotiate with and make demands of not only the SCAF, but also the SCAF's main financial backers, that is, the U.S. government.

So Alterman is arguing for an outcome "that finds a balance — however uneasy — between the military authorities and Egypt’s new politicians. We do not want any one side to vanquish or silence the other." Say that again, Jon? Um, in democratic theory there's this thing called civilian control of the military. Surely, anyone who claims to want to see greater democracy in Egypt should aim to have that principle firmly implemented there! It's not a question of "vanquishing" or "silencing". It's a question of who's in charge.

In the next sentence, he seems to giving another reason why "we" Americans should seek to see the power of Egypt's elected leaders curtailed: "it is especially important that the outcome not drive away Egypt’s educated liberal elite, whose economic connections and know-how will be vital for attracting investment and creating jobs." His clear implication here is that an Islamist government (a) would not be able to mobilize any-- or sufficient numbers of-- "educated" people with "connections and know-how", and (b) would "drive away" the country's liberal elite, whose fabulous attributes "will be vital for attracting investment and creating jobs."

This argument is nonsense on stilts! It is based on incredibly condescending views of observant Muslims and the Islamist parties that grow up in their communities, to the effect that they really do not have sufficient education, know-how, or connections to run a successful modern economy.

Turkey, anyone? (Or come to that, Iran-- and the impressive abilities its technicians showed recently when they hijacked the US military's allegedly "stealth" RQ-170 drone... )

But the argument Alterman is making is also a sly one. By placing his "concern" about Egypt's "educated liberal elite" right there alongside his argument for the military to still retain a say in national governance, he sis clearly implying that the military can be a guardian for the interests of the liberal elite.

Actually, that too is a pretty stupid argument. True, there are some in the "liberal elite" who strongly indicated in the past that they would be happy to see some form of military guarantee, or counter-balance, to protect them from the programs and policies of the Islamists; but for quite a while now relations between the SCAF and the liberals have been far, far worse than the relations either side has with, say, the MB. But I guess Alterman is adducing this argument here as a way of making the support he is expressing for a continued strong military role in Egypt more appealing to Western liberals...

Anyway, in his's last paragraph, he states his position clearly: "what Egyptians, and Americans, need is ... not a victory, but an accommodation." That is, he doesn't want to see a true victory for a democratically elected civilian leadership in Egypt, or for the important democratic principle of civilian control of the military; but he wants to see a continuing strong role for the military in Egypt's governance.

Describing his own policy preference as a "need" for both Egyptians and Americans" is, of course, colonial, patronizing, and quite unwarranted. Let Egypt's voters (who include, of course, all the members of the military) define their country's needs on their own behalf. They don't need Jon Alterman to do it for them.

Tell me again why anyone ever thought that NATO missiles were capable of somehow 'delivering' democracy and a system of respecting basic human rights in Libya?

Stephen writes of the country's current rulers, the National Transitional Council:

The NTC refuses to say who its members are, or even how many there are. Although it appointed a cabinet last month, policy decisions are taken inside what amounts to a black box. Meetings are held in secret, voting records are not published, and decisions are announced by irregular television broadcasts.

Typical was last week's announcement, which came out of the blue, that the oil and economy ministries would be moved to Benghazi, and the finance ministry to Misrata. Diplomats scoffed at the impracticality of such a scheme, which would leave Libya's administration scattered over hundreds of miles. This opacity reminds some Libyans of how things were run in former times...

According to diplomats, the country can move forward only when the national army controls the militias. However, the national army is neither national nor an army.

It was formed in the February revolution in the eastern city of Benghazi by several hundred army officers who defected to the rebels. But most of the army itself remained loyal to Muammar Gaddafi. All of which has left this "national army" with plenty of chiefs but precious few Indians.

The militias, meanwhile, are getting organised. Those of Zintan and Misrata are in effect citizen armies, controlled by their leaders and military councils. Discipline remains a problem, with older members complaining of too many unemployed young men with guns, but order in both cities is more complete than in Tripoli, where gunfire crackles on most nights.

Here is the scene that Stephen described:

Last weekend the army tried to storm the airport and was stopped in a battle at the main airport checkpoint, which left two militiamen wounded and flights suspended as tracer fire arced over the runways. The army tried again midweek, summoning reinforcements from eastern Libya, only for the column to be stopped 200 miles west by units from Misrata, which are allied with Zintan.

More fighting is expected after unidentified gunmen shot and wounded a son of army commander General Khalifa Hifter in a battle outside Tripoli's biggest bank, then kidnapped another on Friday.

My old friend Hugh Roberts knows 100 times as much about North Africa as I do. In November, he was writing these very sane words in the LRB:

The claim that the ‘international community’ had no choice but to intervene militarily and that the alternative was to do nothing is false. An active, practical, non-violent alternative was proposed, and deliberately rejected. The argument for a no-fly zone and then for a military intervention employing ‘all necessary measures’ was that only this could stop the regime’s repression and protect civilians. Yet many argued that the way to protect civilians was not to intensify the conflict by intervening on one side or the other, but to end it by securing a ceasefire followed by political negotiations...

But why, I wonder, had so many western liberals and rights activists learned nothing from what had happened in Iraq over the preceding eight years? Truly tragic.

Miko has been giving out some great teasers for the book in the writing and lecturing he's been doing in recent months. Today, on his blog, he has this intriguing story:

Newt Gingrich, being the history buff that he is, might be interested in a story I mention in my book The General’s Son, about my mother. She was born and raised in Jerusalem and she remembers the homes of Palestinians families in neighborhoods in West Jerusalem. She told me that when she was a child, on Saturday afternoons she would go for walks through these neighborhoods, admiring the beauty of the homes, watching families sit together in their beautiful gardens. In 1948 when the Palestinian families were forced out of West Jerusalem, my mother was offered one of those beautiful, spacious homes but she refused. At age 22, the wife of a young army officer with little means and with two small children, she refused a beautiful spacious home, offered to her completely free because she could not bear the thought of living in the home of a family that was forced out and now lives in a refugee camp. “The coffee was still warm on the tables as the soldiers came in and began the looting” she told me. “Can you imagine how much those families, those mothers must miss their homes?”

She continued, “I remember seeing the truckloads of loot, taken by the Israeli soldiers from these homes. How were they not ashamed of themselves?”

There are thousands upon thousands of homes in cities all over the country that were taken.

Right now, the particular form of 'constitutional democracy' that the American occupiers imposed on Iraq looks set to implode and as Reidar Visser notes, there is a real possibility of complete political disintegration there. The present situation and future prospects for most of Iraq's 30 million people look very grim indeed.

But in Washington DC-- and Fort Bragg, NC-- Pres. Obama and his people seem oblivious to the fate of Iraqis, intent as they are on trying to "sell" to the American people the idea that simply getting the American troops out of Iraq without them suffering any additional casualties constitutes some kind of a valuable achievement... regardless of what happens to the long-suffering Iraqis.

Obama's people are even trying to fundraise around this idea. Two days ago, I got this email from Obama's re-election campaign:

Helena --

Early this morning, the last of our troops left Iraq.

As we honor and reflect on the sacrifices that millions of men and women made for this war, I wanted to make sure you heard the news.

Bringing this war to a responsible end was a cause that sparked many Americans to get involved in the political process for the first time. Today's outcome is a reminder that we all have a stake in our country's future, and a say in the direction we choose.

Thank you.

Barack

This is wilfull, almost psychopathic, disregard for the facts of human inter-dependence and the responsibility that war-waging nations have under international law for the wellbeing of the civilian residents of the places where they choose to fight their wars.

We have seen this same solipsism in the conduct of the U.S. and its NATO allies in Libya-- and in particular, in the way that the NATO command tried wilfully to disregard the compelling evidence that NATO bombs had killed many of the very same civilians whom they were allegedly acting in Libya to protect.

C.J. Chivers and Eric Schmitt had a generally excellent piece of reporting in the NYT on December 17, in which they detailed both their own painstaking investigations of incidents in which NATO airstrikes in Libya had killed civilians-- and the extreme reluctance of NATO officials to acknowledge these facts.

Libya looks in many ways to be the 'western' nations latest paradigm in how to fight a war. Taking lessons from the problems the United States encountered in running the Iraqi occupation, western actions towards Libya have been much more hands-off. NATO never explicitly put troops on the ground in Libya (except for a few 'deniable' special ops forces), and therefore acts as if it does not have to bear any direct responsibility for running the country now. Meanwhile, the British government still reportedly controls much of Libya's sovereign wealth, and NATO ships continue to police Libya's shoreline. Both those instruments of power can be used to exercise indirect control over key aspects of the post-Qadhafi government's policy.

It all sounds a lot like Gaza to me. There, the Israelis pioneered the whole concept of running a 'hands-off' kind of a military occupation wherein they (quite illegally) deny that they have any responsibility for the welfare of Gaza's residents, while they still nonetheless continue to control all significant interactions between Gaza and the outside world...

At least in Gaza there is one, generally competent, indigenous governing body which has done a generally good job of maintaining public security for the vast majority of the Strip's 1.6 million people-- something that has been especially welcome to Gazans after the lawlessness of the earlier years of IDF/Fateh condominium there. In Libya, by contrast, the power vacuum that followed NATO's destruction of Qadhafi's army and the reluctance of the NATO powers to take any responsibility for post-Qadhafi public security has left the whole country open to the competing militias and warlords who were NATO's local allies.

But why would voters in America or in other NATO powers care about any of that? The bet that Obama and the other NATO leaders are making is that the voters at home won't care at all.

The news analysis piece that the NYT's own Tim Arango also has in the paper today is in stark contrast to Reidar's fine work. It's ill-informed, exculpatory (of Washington), and deeply dishonest. Especially when he writes that the social and sectarian breakdown that Iraq experienced after the U.S. invasion-- and that was certainly exacrebated by the U.S. occupation administration's calculated policies of divide and rule-- was "unforeseen" by Americans before the invasion. They were not unforeseen. Juan Cole, I, and numerous other people who knew a lot more about the country than the dangerous people running the Bush administration foresaw many or most of these problems and published widely about our concerns. If we were not listened to, that was not for lack of us trying to be heard.

When I read Arango's piece I was almost overcome by a wave of sadness and anger. Sadness, for what our country wrought in Iraq, and anger at not having been given any kind of fair hearing in the pre-2003 period (or since.)

Arango does have some good quotes and snippets from Iraqis expressing their anger at the U.S. government after nearly nine years of miserable occupation.

But Reidar's piece really beautifully sums up the analysis of how U.S. policy has continued to be harmful to Iraqis, including under Pres. Barack Obama.

Why do so many western rights activists continue instead to give strong support to the forces of the increasingly militarized opposition in Syria? Do they really want a violence-driven outcome there similar to what we have seen in Iraq and now Libya? Or, do they not understand the basic facts of violence: that violence begets more violence and in the modern, heavily armed world the use of violence is highly inconducive to the building of an accountable, rights-respecting social/political order.

The situation in Syria remains complex. There are many elements inside the country's opposition movement who are sincere democrats. There are others who are vicious sectarians and men of violence. The goal for political leaders inside and outside the country is surely to find a way to engage the former while marginalizing the influence of the latter. Sadly, Pres. Asad seems unable or unwilling to find a way to do this-- and most of the numerous outside forces now supporting the Syria opposition seem very unwilling to do it, as well.

By the way, here is the record of the panel I was recently on, on Syria, at the (Turkish-American) SETA Foundation in DC.

Longtime readers of this blog will be aware that I have followed Turkish-Syrian relations for some time here; and back at the beginning of the current political turmoil in Syria I was arguing that Turkey's AKP government was uniquely positioned and perhaps uniquely motivated to be the principal power mediating the regime-opposition negotiation in Syria that I saw, and still see, as overwhelmingly the best way out of Syria's impasse.

Since I started expressing that position publicly, back in May, several important further developments have occurred. Principally, of course-- and just as I predicted back in the March-May period-- the confrontation between the regime and the opposition in Syria has continued; both sides have demonstrated resiliency; and the casualty toll has continued tragically to grow. There have also been these other developments:

* Turkey's AK government has shifted into a position of much stronger support for the Syrian opposition, with PM Erdogan now openly calling for the resignation of Syria's President Asad, while leaders and members of the militarized, oppositionist 'Free Syrian Army' have been given considerable freedom to organize in the encampments of Syrian refugees in Turkey.

* Attempts by western governments to win a UNSC resolution that would, as with Resolution 1970 in re Libya, have provided a basis for future military action against Syria were rebuffed when both Russia and china vetoed it.

* The Arab League has launched its own strong-seeming diplomatic and political intervention that requires the Syrian government to end the use of repression and violence, engage in negotiations with the opposition, and allow the entry of Arab league monitors-- actually, the deadline for that latter step is today.

* The Arab League-cum-NATO military action against Libya (which was also supported by NATO member Turkey) had been cited as a desired precedent by many in the Syrian opposition. That action was eventually successful in taking over the whole of Libya and killing President Qadhafi. But it took them seven months and a lot of bloody fighting to achieve that; and the outcome inside Libya has been very far from what most pro-democracy, pro-rights activists in the west had hoped for.

One thing that has been much on my mind in recent days is the range of possible effects that the situation in Syria might have on the prospects for democracy not only in Syria but also in Turkey. Of all the Middle Eastern forces currently giving support to a Syrian opposition that claims to pursue the goal of democracy, the only one that any has any credible claim itself to uphold and practice the values of democracy is Turkey. The idea that Saudi Arabia, other GCC countries, Jordan, or the currently military-ruled regime in Egypt has any credibility in saying it seeks the goal of democracy is completely laughable. So it strikes me that sincere supporters of democracy around the world who want to see a democratic and accountable outcome in Syria should pay particular attention to the role that Ankara might yet play there.

It is also the case that for me, one of the bedrocks of any commitment to democracy is a commitment not to use violent means to resolve differences of opinion or politics among fellow-citizens, however deepseated and sensitive these differences may be. Democracy is not really-- or perhaps, not only-- about elections, which are at best only a technical means to reaching a democratic end. (Elections, remember, can be and are used by all kinds of profoundly rights-abusing regimes.) Democracy is about having a fundamental respect for the equality of all human persons and establishing a set of political mechanisms that allow citizens of one state (and eventually, of the whole world-- though we are still a long way from that) to live together peaceably and over the long term while allowing the different communities within that state to live out their own vision of the good life so long as this does not impinge on the rights of others.

Turkey is a country in which many different kinds of social groups live together. These include members of the Sunni-Turkish majority. They also include members of ethnic, religious, and sectarian minorities. They include people who are highly secular and people who are highly pious and for whom "the good life" is necessarily one defined by religious norms. They include highly sophisticated, "Europeanized" urbanites, and people much more rooted to the traditional ways of villages and small towns. Yet somehow, as a result of decisions taken throughout the course of Turkey's modern history-- including both the Kemalist era and the post-Kemalist era-- nearly all these different groups have been able to find a way to come together and agree on the (still-evolving) rules of a democratic order for their country.

I have long thought of this as an amazing achievement. Of course, it is still incomplete. But still, Turkey's people have come so far away from both Ottoman-era theocracy and the intolerant, ethnocratic militarism of Kemalist rule that I think this is an achievement to be acknowledged and celebrated by democrats everywhere.

Turkey's longest land border is its border with Syria-- more than 500 miles long, as I recall. If there is ethnosectarian breakdown in Syria, can Turkey be insulated from that, I wonder? And if so, at what cost?

... Well, the events in Syria are moving fast, and will doubtless continue to do so over the coming three days. So I shan't complete gathering my thoughts for Monday afternoon's presentation until that morning.

As a side-note here, I also want to send my (only slightly qualified) congratulations to my friends at the Crisis Group for having once again produced a very sane and timely analysis of the situation in Syria. In the Conclusion to this study, they write:

That the current crisis and future transition present enormous risks is not a reason to defend a regime that offers no solution and whose sole strategy appears to be to create greater hazards still. Optimally, this would be the time for third-party mediation leading to a negotiated transition.

... However unlikely they are to succeed, mediation efforts ought to be encouraged in principle, and none should be automatically dismissed. The focus should remain for now on the Arab League initiative, the most promising proposal currently on the table. For international actors or the opposition to rule out dialogue or negotiations with the regime would be to validate its argument that nothing short of its immediate fall will be deemed satisfactory. At the same time, Damascus should not be given an opportunity to gain time, nor should it be offered concessions in the absence of tangible signs that it is acting in good faith. Should the regime present a genuine, detailed proposal backed by immediate, concrete steps on the ground – again, an implausible scenario – mediated talks with the opposition should swiftly begin.

Throughout my years in Lebanon during the early years of the civil war there, I saw at first hand how an "Arab League peacekeeping mission" there was used all along by all the different Arab powers to pursue their own, often highly divisive agendas and thus became yet another factor that prolonged the fighting and the suffering there. And I have no reason to believe that the Arab League is in any better position today to plan and run a constructive peacekeeping mission in Syria. In addition, as noted above, it is amazing for anyone truly concerned about pursuing a more democratic and accountable Syria going forward to think that the governments now running the Arab League are well positioned or well suited to help realize that goal. Hence I would like to keep alive the possibility of a role for democratic Turkey in spearheading a serious push for negotiations-- something that the Crisis Group's report doesn't mention.

(On the Arab League, and Qatar's rapidly shifting political role in regional politics, As'ad AbouKhalil has had four excellent short pieces in Al-Akhbar English in the past couple of weeks. You can access them all via this web-page.)

Both those sessions were really thought-provoking. Susan Akram presented a smart and thoughtful set of comments based on the recent essay in Jadaliyya in which she compared the international-law strategy pursued by the PLO over the years highly unfavorably with that pursued by SWAPO and its allies in an earlier era. Bill the spouse was the commentator for that. Rochelle Davis then gave a lovely presentation based on her recent book about "Palestinian Village Histories", and someone from UVA Jewish Studies called Gabriel Finder was the commentator for that one.

What was equally notable to the high quality of both of these discussions was, for me, simply the fact of the open-ness of this corner of American academe to discussing this whole issue of 1948 in such an open-minded way.

These days, dealing with the still-unresolved issues of 1948 is moving back to being an inescapably central part of the whole quest to find a workable and equality-based formula for the longterm coexistence of the Palestinian and Israeli peoples, whether in two states or one. For several years in an earlier era-- perhaps up to 1999 or 2000; or possibly, even later than that?-- it seemed to many people around the world that dealing only with the issues of 1967 (primarily, ending the occupation of the West Bank and Gaza that Israel initiated in that year) would be sufficient and/or workable, while the issues from 1948 (primarily, the question of that large portion of Palestinians who were ethnically cleansed from the area-that-became-Israel that year) could somehow be sidestepped, swept under the rug, or finessed in one way or another.

For many Israelis, however, even trying to discuss the question of the Palestinian refugees as being bearers of rights is still seen as anathema, or as an attempt to "delegitimize Israel", or whatever... and the same is true of the many pro-Israeli watchdogs and discourse-suppression organizations in the U.S. media and the U.S. academy.

That's why I found it particularly refreshing to hear of this symposium, which was organized by Alon Confino, a distinguished Israeli-American professor in the UVA history department. I wish I had the time to write more about the discussions. (Maybe they'll be published some day by Confino and his department?) In the meantime, though, I urge JWN readers to go read Susan Akram's piece on Jadaliyya and Rochelle Davis's book...

Perhaps their motivation really was, in their minds, overwhelmingly a pro-democracy one, based on the demographic weight of Sunnis in the Syrian population. But in that case, surely they should have been eager (as an outside power) to put the opposition's democratic claims to the test as soon as possible, that is, by working proactively with all concerned parties to negotiate the terms for a truly democratic election in Syria? Certainly, if they had done that, then they would have had a lot more credibility as "midwives to democracy" than the Gulf Arab states do...

Democracy, as the AK people should know as well as anyone, does not grow out of the barrel of a gun but is above all a set of tools that are used to resolve very thorny differences and disputes in a nonviolent and rights-respecting way. (As happened between "Whites" and non-"Whites" in South Africa in the early 1990s... and that, after the "White" South Africans had sustained a centuries-long reign of terror in the country that completely dwarfs anything the Baathists have done in Syria. But yet, democrats around the world all cheered loudly-- and imho, quite correctly-- at the news that the Apartheid-enacting National Party had agreed to take part in a free and fair national election against its rivals, rather than having its leaders all strung up on lamp-posts.)

Oh well, not worth my while sitting around for too long, regretting Ankara's failure to play a truly democracy-promoting role in Syria...

So the next question I have in my head is a combination of two questions, really. Firstly, why did the GCC countries and other Arab League member-states step in last week with such (relative) speed and determination to position themselves as the main external mediators of a regime-opposition negotiation in Syria, thereby doing a lot to strengthen Pres. Asad's position, at least temporarily... And the corollary to that is, why on earth should anyone inside or outside Syria take seriously a claim by Saudi Arabia and Qatar to have mainly "democratic" goals in mind in Syria? But really, the first half of this question is the more pressing one, and I'll try to come back to it later.

The next set of questions I have are the ones concerning the linkages and interactions between developments in Libya and those in Syria. Now, I know that a lot of opposition people in Syria were fairly loudly calling for the imposition of a Libya-style "no-fly zone" in Syria. Maybe they still are calling for it. But it ain't going to happen-- for a large number of reasons. One important one is that the GCC countries, whose cooperation with the whole 'NFZ' project in Libya-- and in the case of Qatar and the UAE, their actual participation in it, at least symbolically-- was seen by western countries as crucial to its international "legitimacy", very evidently decided at some point that they were not about to engage in the same kind of hostile act against Pres. Asad in Syria. Another was, of course, the clearcut and definitive Russian and Chinese use of their veto against the US-sponsored resolution in the UNSC which would have provided exactly the same kind of springboard for subsequent military action that resolution 1970 provided for 1973. And another is the fact that in both Europe and the U.S., the appetite for yet another act of military aggression against a distant Muslim land seems to have drained away almost completely-- certainly, compared with the heady days of BHL's bellicosity back in March.

The way things have turned out in Libya has also, I am sure, had its effect on the desire of just about all non-Syrians to engage in a repeat performance in Syria.

The anti-Qadhafi military operation in Libya, remember, was described by its boosters at the time, back in March, as the western-led "NATO-plus-Arabs" coalition finally "getting it right" regarding how to do a foreign military aggression "intervention". Crucially-- and this was especially sold as being a strong contrast to Iraq-- there would not even be any need for western or other foreign "boots on the ground". The whole western intervention would be accomplished from the air, while on the ground in Libya would be the boots only of Libya's' reputed throngs of eager democrats.

So now we have how many competing militias on the ground in Libya? Three hundred or more?

Actually, from the POV of the health and safety of the Libyan people, even a western occupation army might have have been better than this situation-- which shows absolutely no signs of getting any better, any time soon.

So far from being an "exemplary" action by western armies to support local "democrats" in Libya, what has happened in Libya has turned out to be an application of Naomi Klein's "Shock Doctrine", on steroids. That is, the destruction not only of Libya's anyway ramshackle state but also of many of the internal bonds of its society.

Thank you NATO.

(We can also note that if these anti-Qadhafi people who are now rampaging all over Libya had had a decent amount of democratic sensitivity and commitment, they would have been working hard throughout all this year to resolve the many differences among themselves through nonviolent deliberations or negotiations. But no. NATO powerfully modeled for them all that power grows out of the barrel of a gun, or a drone, and they proved eager learners of that lesson.)

So I imagine that even in some of Syria's hard-pressed opposition strongholds, the "Libyan model" doesn't look so irresistibly attractive now as it did, say, a month ago...

Over the past few weeks, various friends and colleagues have pointed me to a number of studies on Syria that they have found interesting. One was this one that Mona Yacoubian published on October 5, under the title "Saving Syria from Civil War." Yacoubian's policy prescription is truly mind-boggling: What she argues for is pursuit of "controlled regime collapse" in Syria-- that is, a policy of deliberately stripping away successive layers of supporters away from the regime until it collapses.

Honestly, Mona Yacoubian should know better than to imagine that there is any such phenomenon in the world as "controlled regime collapse" of the kind she is talking about. Though she sells her policy as one that can "stave off civil war", it seems almost certain to lead only to civil war.

Equally significantly, when she talks about stripping progressively greater sections of the officer class away from their allegiance to Pres. Asad-- or "Bashar", as she cozily calls him-- she makes no mention at all of the extremely salient facts that Syria is still in a state of war with Israel and has some of its national territory occupied and illegally annexed by Israel, and that no patriotic Syrian inside the army or outside of it is easily going to take any action that would undercut the country's military preparedness.

Then yesterday, we had 'Meet Syria's Opposition' by Randa Slim, another Lebanese-American woman. This one gives a lot more informative detail about the make-up of the many disparate groups that are in the Syrian opposition, and doesn't attempt to provide any big-picture prescriptions for American policy. The nearest she comes to making a policy point is this mild and fairly realistic observation, at the beginning of her article:

Seven months into the uprisings, the Syrian opposition has yet to develop a united voice and platform. Unless these disparate groups unite and present a credible and viable alternative to the Assad regime, both Syria's fearful majority and the international community will find it difficult to effectively push for meaningful change in Damascus.

[The opposition's] fragmentation and disunity poses [sic] a formidable challenge. It makes it difficult to assess who is representing whom, the level of public support each enjoys among Syrians, and the role each is playing in the protest movement.

While it is impossible to know which side commands a majority, a critical mass of Syrians has clearly opted for regime change.

This is far from the only place at which her piece is marred by internal inconsistency and lack of clarity. It is a pity, too, that though her piece came out the same day the Arab League delegation announced its "peace plan" for Syria, she makes no mention of the impact that will have. All she does is note that "Pro-Assad Lebanese allies told me that Qatar and Saudi Arabia were the main funders [of the opposition.] There is no independent evidence to substantiate such claims." For his part, As'ad AbouKhalil has regularly pointed to links between Saudi Arabia and some members of the Syrian opposition, on his blog, e.g. here.

But if, as seems to me almost certainly to have been the case, various Saudi institutions have been supporting some of the Islamist portions of the Islamist/Ikhwani portions of the opposition-- what has happened to that support in the wake of the Arab League peace effort?

Slim doesn't explore that question at all. (She also makes no mention of Syria's state of war with Israel.)

... So finally, we come to this paper, today, from the Crisis Group. Its tone is markedly different from the evident anti-Asadism of Yacoubian and Slim-- though it is also written with the sensibilities of a Western audience very clearly in mind. The whole first paragraph sets the tone, as well as defining the policy prescription:

Syria's acceptance of the Arab League proposal to defuse the crisis presents an eleventh-hour opportunity to seek a negotiated transition before the conflict takes an even uglier turn. Despite understandable scepticism, both the protest movement and the international community ought to give this initiative a fair chance; for either one to dismiss or undermine it would be to offer the regime justification for rejecting both the deal and responsibility for its failure. The regime's intentions soon will be put to the test. In coming days, protesters will take to the streets with renewed energy, probing President Bashar al Assad's sincerity after months of rising repression; they cannot be expected to show patience for protracted political talks devoid of swift, tangible results on the ground. The various strands of the opposition ought to publicly reject violent attacks against security forces and accept to engage in a dialogue with no condition other than the regime's implementation of the plan. Likewise the international community should fully endorse the deal and adjust its reaction to developments on the ground. Only by giving Damascus a genuine opportunity to live up to its commitments under the plan can the international community reach consensus on holding it accountable should it choose to flout them.

Above all, the CG's careful argument as to why the Arab League initiative should be supported and given a chance is really important. I wish, though, that the paper had done more to urge its mainly Western-official target audience to work hard alongside the Arab League mediators to push them much further toward pursuit of a truly democratic outcome in Syria than they might otherwise be inclined to go.

But even in this generally strong CG piece, frustratingly, I still could not find answers to my own two big questions about what has been happening in the orbit of the Syria issue, namely: Why has Ankara adopted such a strongly pro-opposition position, and why have the GCC countries intervened so strongly over the past week or so to let Pres. Asad off the hook?

The most plausible answers to the latter question have to do, I think, with two things: Firstly, a fear in many Arab countries that if Syria follows the path of Libya, it might end up following the terrifying path of social breakdown (fitna) that the Arab countries have seen come about not only in Libya, but also in Iraq, in the wake of Western military aggression "intervention"... and the fact that Syria, like Iraq, is much closer to the heartland of the populations and concerns of most Arab countries than is Libya.The past two weeks have seen the emergence of a lot of very bad news from Libya, remember, which could well help to explain the timing of the Arab League's activism on the Syria-negotiation question.

Secondly, I don't think any Arab governments can ignore-- as Mona Yacoubian, Randa Slim, and even the Crisis Group all managed to-- the fact of Syria's continuing state of war with Israel and its close proximity to Israel.

Back at the beginning of October, did Asad tell Turkish foreign minister Davutoglu that "If a crazy measure is taken against Damascus, I will need not more than six hours to transfer hundreds of rockets and missiles to the Golan Heights to fire them at Tel Aviv," as the Israeli website Ynet quoted the Iranian Fars news agency as having reported? A spokesman for the Turkish foreign ministry strongly denied this. But if the intention of the Iranian "leak" had been to scare the bejeesus out of the Gulf Arab countries in particular, maybe it had some effect.

(My view of that reported threat? I think six hours is ways more than Israel would need to undertake a devastating counter-strike, so what Asad reportedly "threatened" didn't sound very threatening to Israel as such-- but it certainly would threaten to inflame matters in the whole of the rest of the Middle East.)

There is, to put it bluntly, a bit of a protection racket being sustained by the Syrians (or perhaps, in this case, by the Iranians on their behalf) over some of the other Arab states, in a way that almost exactly mirrors the protection racket that has long been sustained by Israel over the United States... Both Syria (or Syria/Iran) threatens to blow up the whole Middle East by attacking Israel if the Arab states don't do what Asad wants them to... Just as Israel periodically threatens to blow up the whole Middle East by attacking Iran if Washington doesn't do exactly what Netanyahu wants it to (which in his case, is overwhelmingly to allow him to continue paving over the whole of the West Bank for the illegal Israeli settlers, without raising a finger in protest.)

Ah, Realpolitik. What a dirty business, eh?

In this case, however, it may well end up tending to take Syria's people to a much better (because negotiated) outcome than they could ever expect if they choose to follow the path of Iraq or Libya. Yes, it would certainly be amazingly difficult for Syria to be able to democratize while it is still under threat and partial occupation by Israel. Yes, it would be amazingly difficult to reverse the terrible course toward increasing internal polarization and schism that Syrian society has been following for the past nine months. Yes, it seems amazingly unlikely that Riyadh or Doha would ever end up as champions of democracy!

But.... The alternatives to finding a negotiated outcome to the Syrian conflict are now all far, far worse.... As I've been saying like a broken record for six months now, in Syria both the regime and the opposition are resilient and won't be defeated easily. Trying to find a negotiated and democratic way out of this impasse still seems like the best-- indeed, the only-- way forward. And this negotiation should only be over the form of governance inside Syria-- that is, a negotiation for how a transition to democracy will be implemented-- and not a negotiation over outcomes, i.e., that "Asad must go", or whatever. It must be a negotiation that keeps a place at the table for the representatives of all significant forces in society on the basis of preserving the patriotic unity of the country and its people that they all so desperately need, despite-- or rather, precisely because of-- the depth of the wounds and resentments they bear from the recent and the more distant past. And they need it, too, because of the continuing state of war with Israel and the presence of very threatening Israeli forces looming on Jebel al-Shaikh right over the approaches to Damascus.

Look, you think it was easy for South Africans to overcome their resentments in 1992-94 and sit down at the table together? But who among the democrats of western countries is not glad today that they did so? Almost nobody. So why should we not support a negotiated transition to democracy in the case of Syria, also? (The Crisis Group report was quite right, by the way, to point out that Washington's repeated calls for regime change in Syria have been extremely unhelpful...)

This week, the Mediterranean Basin has seen three very significant gatherings. At one end of the Med, leaders from Afghanistan and 13 other countries have been meeting in Istanbul, to try to figure out the shape of the country's post-U.S. security structure. Well, that's not how it's been openly described there, I grant you. The non-U.S. participants have been too polite to describe in full detail just what a terrible state Afghanistan is in, ten years after the U.S.-led invasion and occupation, and two years after Obama announced his decision to "surge" more U.S. troops into the country-- thereby, quite voluntarily, making the war "his own."

Back in late 2009, I wrote, in this piece in Boston Review, that the best explanation I could give for Obama having made such an evidently counter-productive decision was because he was planning to use that surge as political cover for a later drawdown/withdrawal.... As is now proving to have been the case. But at what a cost! (And the cost of the past two years of the U.S. war there has, as I noted in that article, been borne overwhelmingly by Afghanistan's people, along with their neighbors in drone-targeted Pakistan.)

The U.S. military has turned out to be such a force for mayhem in the world in recent years that I can almost not bear to think about it. From Afghanistan, to Iraq, to Pakistan, to Somalia, to Yemen-- and now, to Libya... What has the U.S. military brought in its wake?? The collapse of communities, of whole economies, of institutions, and families... Tragedies, wherever you look.

This is not to indict individual members of the military, which as a group of people probably contains as great a proportion of decent, competent people as any group of that size. What has happened has not been the fault of the individual people in the military, but in the fact that it was the military that was used at all in response to all these problems. For each and every one of those "problems", there were non-military policies that were available and could have been pursued-- most likely with, at the end of the day, a lot more success from the American people's point of view than we ended up winning. But the rush, the urge, the unseemly push to use military force proved overwhelming. Especially to those three presidents-- Clinton, George W. Bush, and Obama-- who had never themselves experienced the horrors of war.

Almost none of this destruction need have happened-- if only these men and their advisers had kept fast to the older, more principled visions of America as a country that upholds and strengthen the rule of international law and all the institutions built up around it... If only these men had not been so easily tempted by the 'flash-bang' wizardry and testosterone-driven arrogance of war.

But here we are. And at the other end of the Mediterranean this week, there have been two notably different kind of gatherings. At one of them, on Monday, world leaders gave a strong vote to Palestine's application to become a member of the UN's Educational, Scientific, and Cultural organization (UNESCO). In that vote, 107 nations (including several substantial European allies of Washington) defied vigorous American arm-twisting to support the Palestinian request.

The U.S. State Department announced almost immediately that it would stop providing the funding it has been giving to UNESCO. Far-reaching legislation passed over recent years by the strongly Israeli-controlled U.S. Congress means that the administration may have to extend its funding cut-off to other agencies, too.

How very, very far the United States has come from those idealistic days, 60 years ago, when it was a victorious America, standing unchallenged astride the the whole world, that exercised wisdom and restraint by setting up the United Nations as a set of institutions based on the key principles of human equality, respect for the rule of law, and the need to stress nonviolent, negotiated ways to resolved conflicts whenever possible.

And today, in the French coastal city of Cannes, a slightly different set of world leaders is gathering at the G-20 meeting to try to figure out how to deal with the continued, deep malaise in the capitalism-led global economy.

The proximate cause for the current world-financial malaise has been the failure of the Euro zone countries to nail down a hard and plausible plan to end the severe debt crisis faced by some zone members. But the deeper crisis is the truly global one that goes back to the world financial crisis of late 2008.... And that crisis was certainly intimately connected to the two phenomena of the disregard of the rule of law in economic affairs-- or, more precisely, the disregard of the very necessary role that certain kinds of regulations play, in protecting the operation of free and fair markets-- and the eruption of militarism as the major tool used in the global arena by the country that from 1991 until now has stood unchallenged at the apex of the international system.

And now, so many of these chickens are coming home to roost, all at the same time.

On Afghanistan, here will be another conference convened in early December. In Bonn, as it happens. That is, marking almost exactly ten years to the day since that fateful Bonn conference of December 2001 when the relevant world powers gathered together to determine how to form the first post-U.S.-invasion government in Afghanistan. In all these conferences on Afghanistan-- the one in 2001, and the two this year-- Iran is a significant participant, along with the United States. (China seems to be playing a more prominent role in this year's conferences than ten years ago; but it is still-- probably wisely-- keeping to a fairly discreet second-tier rule. The CCP's leaders have probably been far more concerned about the matters being discussed in Cannes, than those discussed in Istanbul this week.)

But back to Iran. Iran has lengthy common borders not only with Iraq, but also with Afghanistan. When the U.S. military went into first Afghanistan, then Iraq, it did so with the help of some non-trivial sets of understandings with the rulers in Tehran. Today, it is almost impossible to see how Washington can pull its forces safely, and with minimal casualties, out of either of these countries without nailing down some very similar sets of understandings with Tehran, just like in 2001 and 2003...

And now is the point at which Israeli PM Netanyahu starts openly agitating for an Israeli military strike against Iran?

Unbelievable.

Netanyahu and the other extremist elements in the Israeli government have, with the help of their many allies and acolytes within the U.S., been leading the U.S. government by the nose for the past 20 years... and leading our country to one disaster after another. And now, they want to threaten a completely unnecessary war against Iran??

Truly unbelievable. It is time for this nonsense to stop, and for America's people to regain control of our own government so it will once again serve our interests and ideals rather than getting jerked around, again and again and again, by a small foreign country.

I came to the United States in 1982. When I first came here, there were constant rumblings of "warnings" or "hot information" or whatever that said that "Iran now seems likely to get nuclear weapons within 3-5 years." It was always nearly that that same window: sometime "three to five years", sometime 'two to three years."

That was 29 years ago.

(And we're still hearing it. That AP article linked to above quotes recently retired Mossad head Meir Dagan as saying that Iran might get nuclear weapons "in 2015"... which is, um, three to five years from now...)

Meantime, there has been only one state in the Middle East that has constantly and consistently, for the past40-plus years, actually had a very robust and present nuclear-weapons capability: That is the tiny, bullying state of Israel.

But let's get back to the big picture of what is happening in the world system these days. U.S. power is diminishing by the hour, and there is a kind of sucking sound in the global system as other powers realize they are going to have to adjust to that. (Actually, I think that is probably what is causing a lot of the otherwise crazy, irrational behavior in Israel these days... I mean, where will Netanyahu and his Israeli-extremist allies be, once the U.S. government is incapable of protecting them any more from the requirements of international law and international fairness?)

So we can expect some more very interesting months and years immediately ahead of us. The international system is changing at, yes, almost warp speed. The heavy bets that so many people had laid on the continuation of U.S. power at the apex of the world system-- yes, that includes you, Hosni Mubarak and Zein el-Abidin Ben Ali, along with Benjamim Netanyahu-- are proving, very rapidly, to have been quite hollow. A lot of new forces will arise in the chaotic years ahead. But I hope that enough people in the world are now smart enough, and caring enough, and principled enough, that out of this dynamism we can bring a world order that's much more seriously dedicated to the ideal of the equality of all human persons, and that has a much deeper understanding of the futility and horrors of violence and war, than the world we lived in for the past two decades.

This kind of a good outcome is not, by any means, guaranteed. But the global situation is at least dynamic enough right now that if enough of us work hard and together for these ideals, then we do have a real chance of remaking the world for the better.

This is a phenomenon of an almost Biblical 40-year periodicity: After all, it was back in around 1970 that the Arab world's political shape settled into broadly the same pattern that it then retained until January of this year.

(As it happens, I made my first visit to the region-- to Beirut-- in 1970. This is, I realize, neither here nor there... Mainly, it makes me feel old.)

It was in 1969 that a young colonel called Muammar Qadhafi had toppled "King" Idris in Libya... The political shifts that occurred in the Arab world the following year were more closely related to Palestine since they stemmed in good part from the tragic battles of 1970's 'Black September'. In those battles, Jordan's U.S.-backed (and discreetly Israeli-backed) King Hussein reimposed an oppressive system of total control on his kingdom (and on its national population which then as now included a numerical majority of 'West Bank' Palestinians) by chasing out the Palestinian guerrillas who had become well established there over the preceding three years... Provocatively well established, one could say. The king's Black September campaign was, indeed, directly precipitated by an action in which the PLO-affiliated Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine hijacked four international aircraft and landed them at an airstrip in northern Jordan...

During Black September, the Cairo-based Arab League worked hard to try to negotiate a settlement between Hussein and the Palestinians. On September 27, Egypt's iconic, strongly Arab-nationalist president Gamal Abdel-Nasser convened an emergency summit meeting of Arab leaders in Cairo in an attempt to hammer out an agreement. The next day, he suffered a heart attack and died. (Five million Egyptians flocked to the streets to witness the passing of his cortege.)

Nasser was succeeded in the presidency by his vice-president, Anwar Sadat, a man who shared Nasser's military background but not his commitment to a broadly 'non-aligned' form of Arab nationalism. Throughout Sadat's eleven years in office, his main goal was to steer Egypt into a close alliance with Washington; and he seemed more than willing to enter into the bilateral peace agreement with Israel that was the entry-fee for that alliance. The Egyptian-Israeli peace of 1979 decoupled mighty Egypt from the Palestinians' long-running quest for national liberation. After Sadat was assassinated in 1981, his vice-president, Hosni Mubarak, succeeded him. Mubarak hewed just as closely to the pro-American path as his predecessor. His longevity and the hyper-alertness of his ever-repressive mukhabarat gave him the time in office that neither Nasser nor Sadat had, in which to build the basis of dynastic rule..

Notably, in all the time Mubarak was president, he never named a vice-president... He also increasingly evidently started to groom his son Gamal to succeed him.

Meantime, back in the Black September of 1970, the conflict in Jordan soon enough made its effects felt on Syria, as well. The 'leftist' wing of the Baath Party, which until then was in power in Syria, had sent tanks into northern Jordan to help the Palestinians. But when those tanks came under threat of serious attack from Hussein's tanks, the ground forces commanders in Damascus begged for air support from Syria's air force. The air force commander, Hafez al-Asad, turned down their request. Without any air support, the Syrian tanks retreated speedily back to Syria; and amidst the political chaos and bouts of recriminations that ensued he undertook a swift coup in Damascus that brought his much more cautious, centrist wing of the Baath Party into power...

Where it has stayed until today.

Asadist Syria pursued, by and large, a much more 'statist' and less ideological set of policies than its predecessor. On many occasions that involved taking very harsh actions-- against Syrians, against Lebanese, and against the Palestinians in both Syria and Lebanon.

... In Syria, Hafez al-Asad was almost seamlessly followed into power by his son, Bashar. In Jordan, Hussein was almost seamlessly followed by his son, Abdullah II. In Egypt and Libya, over the decade of the 2000s, it became increasingly clear that the rulers, despite claims of allegiance to republican idealism, were preparing an 'Asadist' type of familial succession...

In the PLO, Yasser Arafat was followed into power by his decades-long Fateh colleague Abu Mazen. No generation change there. And over the years Fateh, too long in power with too little to show for it except the continuous expansion of Israeli settlements in East Jerusalem and the rest of the West Bank, suffered increasing internal rot.

* * *

Of course, many other huge things were happening in the Arab world in the 40 years that followed 1970. There were numerous important wars. There was the landmark Madrid peace conference of almost exactly 20 years ago today. There was the whole inglorious 'Oslo' episode, whose endless rounds of useless negotiations ended up merely providing cover for Israel's continued paving over of the West Bank... There was the bloody and horrendously traumatic American invasion of Iraq... an action that-- as soon as it became abundantly clear that the original casus belli of forestalling a ready-to-go Iraqi WMDs program was a figment only of the U.S. neocons' over-active imaginations-- was retroactively redefined as having had the purpose of "bringing democracy to the Arab world."

That ideological repositioning of what, as everyone in the region quickly saw, turned out to be a bloody and longlasting disaster, wrought havoc on the dreams and projects of the many democrats throughout the Arab world. Along with all their other compatriots, those democrats looked at the fitna (social breakdown) and grand-scale human suffering that followed the conducting of no less than three popular votes in Iraq, under the auspices of the US military occupation, in the period 2005-06... And they concluded, quite reasonably, that U.S.-imposed democracy was certainly not the way to go.

Indeed, it's quite possible to surmise that the 'Arab Spring' might have happened several years earlier, if the dead weight of the Iraqi experience had not been hung around the neck of Arab democrats over the past few years.

* * *

A full history of the 'Arab Spring' needs to take into account the many more proximate influences that led up to it... The inspiration of the Palestinians' First Intifada of 1987-93... and of the early months of the Second Intifada of late 2000. (Westerners forget too often that the first 6-8 weeks of the Second Intifada were almost wholly nonviolent on the Palestinian side. It was only after the Israeli forces had killed more than 200 unarmed Palestinians that the Palestinian factions decided to take up arms.) ... The disturbing sight of Pres. Mubarak (and Jordan's King Abdullah) lining up time after time after time to support Israel's extremely destructive and lethal attacks against its neighbors... The rampant takeover of so many economies in the Arab Mashreq by self-interested crony capitalists, and all the disruption, privation, and human misery that resulted from that (See this recent strong reporting on the role that US aid programs played in this regard, in Egypt. Also, go and buy Rami Zurayk's fabulous book, Food, Farming, and Freedom, to see the account he gives of the role that US-imposed trade and aid policies played in bringing about the destruction of rural livelihoods and rural communities all around the Arab world.)... The intensification of campaigns of repression by so many Arab governments, that in the cases of Egypt, Jordan, Yemen, Libya, and the Palestinian Authority-- okay, not strictly a 'government', but still-- were all actively supported by Washington... The repeated, glaring instances of the double standards Washington applied to any matter concerning the region, running the gamut from accusations of nuclear weapons programs (Iran's, vs. Israel's), to support for democratization and freedom of expression (Iran, vs. Egypt, the PA, Jordan)... The humiliating knowledge that all the important decisions in so many Arab countries were being taken with Washington and Israel's interests in mind, way above any interest in the citizens' own wellbeing...

Yes, no wonder that under the tectonic plates of the long-ossified Arab political system, huge forces of dissent were simmering.

Starting last December 17, within short order, the following things happened:

• Vegetable vendor Mohamed Bouazizi self-immolated in a provincial town in Tunisia, sparking a mass protest movement nationwide;
• Tunisian president Ben Ali fled the country (January 14);
• mass demonstrations convened in Cairo's Tahrir Square (January 25 and 28);
• the Egyptian military stepped in and removed Mubarak from power (February 11);
• the Security Council issued a first stern demarche to Libyan ruler Qadhafi warning him to stop armed attacks against unarmed civilian demonstrators (February 26-- in resolution 1970);
• and followed up (March 17, resolution 1973) with a resolution authorizing members states, "to take all necessary measures... to protect civilians and civilian populated areas under threat of attack in the Libyan Arab Jamahiriya, including Benghazi, while excluding a foreign occupation force of any form on any part of Libyan territory"...and two days later, French jets roared over Benghazi to start the NATO-plus, stand-off operations against Libya that seven months later resulted in the rebels' takeover of the whole country and the grisly killing in captivity (October 20) of Muammar Qadhafi.

* * *

Meanwhile, extremely large-scale and well-organized pro-democracy movements in two key countries in the Arabian Peninsula-- Bahrain and Yemen-- were being very violently repulsed by national governments that have long been key allies of the United States.

In the tiny island monarchy of Bahrain (home to the U.S. Navy's 'Fifth' Fleet), an amazingly well disciplined pro-democracy movement had grown up over the years and, as the Tunisian and Egyptian mass movements came out onto the streets, Bahrain's democrats decided to do the same, as well. Their main occupation/claiming of public space occurred at the Pearl Roundabout, a hub graced by a towering sculpture of a pearl... (Pearl diving had been the traditional occupation of the Bahraini indigenes, most of them Shiite, long before Sunni travelers from across the water in the Arabian mainland had come across and established trading-posts, followed by an 'emirate', and even more recently, a 'monarchy'.)

On March 16-- just one day before Washington so hypocritically supported resolution 1973 against Qadhafi-- the Bahraini forces, aided by Saudi forces sent in along the causeway Saudi Arabia had built to Bahrain some years ago-- moved in to crush the democracy movement. Two days later, they even demolished the whole of the 'Pearl' monument. Read Amnesty International's reports of continuing gross rights violations in Bahrain since then.

The situation in Yemen is at this point far less clear-cut. Indeed, it has always been so, Yemen is a massive country. Its population of 23.5 million citizens is easily the largest citizen body on the whole Arabian Peninsula. But it doesn't have oil; and it is far and away the poorest country on the Peninsula.

Look, I don't know a lot of detail about Yemen's internal politics. It is a mountainous country, and as a result home to many different kinds of social groups, nearly all of them Arabic-speaking. There are reportedly some strongly matrilineal tribes there, where the men sit around and braid their hair all day. There are very dark-complected African communities that retain many of their African folkways. There are some expanses of flat cultivated land where farmers wear conical straw hats. There are northerners and southerners, easterners and westerners, Zaidis and Houthis and Hadhramautis and more... (Probably one of the best sources for good information about Yemen-- as for so much else-- is the Jadaliyya website, where you can find the work of Sheila Carapico, Stephen Day, Fawwaz Trabulsi, and more... Or, these two very informative recent pieces in Middle East Report: by Sheila Carapico, in May, and Stacey Philbrick Yadav, last week.)

One snapshot picture I have of Yemen is that it is "Saudi Arabia's Gaza." That is, it's the place from which Saudi Arabia took some of the best land-- and then, to which, in 1991, it relegated huge numbers of people who had previously labored hard in the Saudi economy... in this case, more than a million... while it replaced them with short-term contract laborers imported on very short-term and repressive contracts from Asia.

Just like Israel, with the Palestinians of Gaza...

Pertinent fact: GDP per capita in SA (2005):$14,979. GDP per capita in Yemen (2005): $923.

But I do recognize that the situation in Yemen is far more complicated, politically, than the situation in Gaza.

One of the complications is the U.S. hand in Yemen, which is exercised almost wholly by the U.S. military, in its pursuit-by-drone of alleged leaders and members of the group described as "Al Qaeda in the Arab Peninsula" (AQAP). Pres. Ali Abdullah Saleh evidently entered some years ago into a pact with Centcom whereby Centcom or the Special Operations Command had considerable freedom to "hunt down" alleged AQAP people in broad areas of Yemen on the basis of "plausible deniability" by Saleh himself-- and in return for significant, broader security and political support by the U.S. (and Saudi Arabia) for Saleh, against any domestic opponents.

(Okay, in this respect, much like Washington's relationship with the Pakistani military.)

Politically, the Obama administration has apparently reached the (not unreasonable) conclusion that it really does not know how to "intervene" effectively in Yemen; and it has subcontracted this job-- as in Bahrain?-- to the Saudis. Hence, Saleh has made a number of trips to Saudi Arabia over recent years-- and remember, the intense internal unrest in Yemen antedates Mohamed Bouazizi's self-immolation, by several years, going back (at least) to the outbreak of the Houthi rebellion in 2004-2005. Some of those trips by Saleh to Saudi Arabia were under the guise of "getting medical help"; some under other pretexts. Earlier this year, it seemed that the Saudis had "decided" to replace him in power in Sana'a during one of his absences from the city-- but then, there he was again recently, back in Yemen with the apparent blessing of the Saudis.

We should not, of course, in this survey of "where we are the Arab Spring", ignore the role that the Saudis-- and to a lesser extent the Qataris-- have played... At the regionwide level, the Saudis' main contribution has been to bankroll the counter-revolutionary (anti-democratic) forces. But for the Saudi rulers, both Bahrain and Yemen are crucial components of their own back yard.

Of course, Saudi Arabia is now itself in the midst of an extremely long-drawn-out succession crisis. Saudi "diplomacy" has anyway always been a very episodic, personality-driven business, with very little institutional basis for sustained follow-through or monitoring of anything that's happening in foreign affairs. But now, King Abdullah is stumbling ever closer to his 90th birthday. (Question of the day: How much longer can the most expensive advances in American medical science keep this man alive?) His designated 'Crown Prince', Prince Sultan, finally passed away last week. (As'ad AbouKhalil thinks he died a long time ago. But anyway, the death got announced last week.) And then, as I've noted here before... the crown is likely to pass along the long line of still-surviving sons of King Abdul-Aziz bin Saud, all of them now aged between their late 60s and their late 80s, before a transition of some peaceable or non-peaceable form takes place to a member of the next generation.

So we should not necessarily expect any very intelligent or reasoned set of policies to be emanating from Riyadh, with regard to any of these 'Arab Spring' developments.

This is probably a very important place to note the importance of Sunni-Shia differences, or perceptions or fears of such, in what's happening in many places during this 'Arab Spring'-- most especially in all the Gulf Countries (including inside Saudi Arabia), and also in Syria.

Yes, I'm getting to Syria here. Bear with me.

In regard to the Sunni-Shia 'issue', the experience of Iraq in the wake of the U.S. invasion of 2003 has had huge effects in the region. Prior to March 2003, Saddam's regime was seen by all the Sunni-dominated regimes of the Gulf as a very valuable "bulwark" against any encroachment of Shiite power from Iran. In the view of the GCC monarchs, the U.S. invasion ended up simply "giving" Iraq to the Shiites and also to Iran. They don't tend to focus on the fact that the vast majority of the Shiites in Iraq-- as in their own countries-- are ethnically Arabs, not Persians; and they are not necessarily pre-disposed to prefer Tehran's rule over self-rule. Shiaphobia, that is, an exaggerated fear of Shiites, is a huge driver of the foreign policies pursued by all the GCC governments; and as in the case of all such phobias, this one cannot easily be assuaged by reference to such mundane things as facts, or the existence of a long history of a shared life together, or even much basic human decency...

Bottom line on the Saudis: expect continued erratic flip-flops in the way they pursue their regional interests. Also, expect that the succession issue will dominate the attention of all senior princes; and it may well interact in interesting and surprising ways with Riyadh's pursuit of its regional diplomacy.

Bottom line on Yemen: expect a lot more tragedy, conflict, and suffering ahead-- unless the forces of the country's impressively resilient and focused opposition movement can succeed in slowly expanding their power until Saleh decides to do the decent thing and follow Ben Ali into exile.

* * *

So now, Syria.

Back in May, I was articulating my judgment that the country has both a resilient government and a resilient opposition movement... And therefore, sadly, that the stand-off between them would most likely continue for a further long while. And that has been the case.

Back in May, I was arguing that the best way to break this stalemate, and thereby to save the Syrian people from the huge amount of suffering that it would necessarily involve, would be to have some kind of authoritative, externally mediated negotiation between the regime and the opposition, over the modalities of how real democratic reform could speedily be instituted in the country.

Neither side was willing to enter such a reform process voluntarily. For the regime, any hint of entering serious negotiations with the opposition would seem to give the opposition some legitimacy. For the opposition, the only thing that most of its supporters were willing to negotiate about back then-- and probably, still today-- was the exit of the regime. Many of these oppositionists felt, too, that even letting the regime's leaders leave the country safely, in the manner of Ben Ali, would not be enough: They wanted to see Asad and his cronies "brought to justice", "held fully accountable", humiliated, punished, and brought low.

There was also (and remains) the question of the ability of leaders on each side to enter into a negotiation, as well. On the regime side, how much freedom of action does Pres. Bashar al-Asad actually have, in such matters? And on the opposition side, it is not as if you have one single, dominating and disciplined pro-democracy movement along the lines of, say, the ANC in late-apartheid South Africa. The Syrian opposition has been marked by a cacophony of voices (despite the best efforts of the U.S. government, Turkey, and others, to persuade its figures and personalities to try to unify and get their act together.)

Back in May, I was arguing that of the available outside negotiators, the government of Turkey seemed to be the one best placed-- and also, most highly motivated-- to try to lead the mediation mission. The good positioning came, I thought, from the good relations that Ankara had built with both the regime and some parts of the Syrian opposition-- as well as from the general attitudes of Syria's people toward Turkey, which shifted to being extremely favorable over the past few years, especially in light of the "no visa" policy between them and the attractiveness of the "Turkish model" for economic affairs and governance, which a vast majority of Syrians have seen as distinctly preferable to that offered by their other major partner in the region, Iran.

Turkey's motivation, I argued, would come from the facts that its border with Syria is by far the longest of any of its land borders; and that Syria is an important transit country for Turkish companies doing business with Jordan, Lebanon, Saudi Arabia, and several other Arab countries.

But I guess that Turkey's AK Party leaders saw things differently. In the weeks after I was writing and speaking about this topic back in May, Ankara (and perhaps a large part of Turkish public opinion, as well?) started shifting noticeably toward giving ever stronger support to the Syrian opposition. I have wondered what motivated this shift, which seemed to fly in the face of the AK Party's longstanding policy of seeking "zero problems with the neighbors". Was it merely a desire to try to be "on the right side of history", that was arrived at after conducting some form of analysis that the Asad regime's days were numbered? Earlier in the spring, Ankara had undertaken just that kind of a recalibration with respect to Libya: There, Turkey had previously had extensive business links with the Qadhafi regime. But on March 19 (or shortly thereafter), Ankara was lining itself up with those of the NATO forces who were participating in the sea blockade of Libya-- that, after it had successfully extracted the thousands of Turkish workers who had previously been working on huge construction contracts in Libya (along with, as I recall, some number of wounded Libyans who needed to be evacuated from encircled cities.)

Or was Ankara's shift motivated by more ideological, Sunni-ist concerns? Who knows?

Anyway, suffice it to say that Ankara's increasing identification with the Syrian opposition played a role in hardening the political positions espoused by many oppositionists. In addition, various outside forces proved themselves able to push significant amounts of arms into Central Syria (to Homs, from the north Lebanese city of Tripoli and elsewhere in Lebanon), and into northeastern Syria, from Iraq. The fact that the Israeli secret services have strong networks in both some areas of Lebanon and some areas of northern Iraq should not be ignored-- but there are plenty of other actors who could also be suspected of having a hand in this.

It has been really hard to get solid news out of Syria. Nir Rosen has done some good work for the Al-Jazeera website. But much of Al-Jazeera's reporting has been hyperbolic and based on the thinnest of sourcing. Since Qatar started working openly with NATO in Libya, the Qatari government seems to have exercised a lot more control over Al-Jazeera's reporting; and in Syria, Qatar's deeply Wahhabist government seems to have decided at some point-- along with the Saudis-- to throw its weight behind the Sunni-ist portions of the Syrian opposition.

For a while, some opposition voices in Syria were openly calling for NATO to repeat, in their country, the same kind of operations they had mounted against Libya. But a number of things stopped that from happening. The most important was the veto that both China and Russia cast on October 4, against a resolution that seemed (though in slightly softer tones) to deliver the same kind of demarche to Syria that resolution 1970 had earlier delivered to Libya, and thus to prepare the way for a military intervention-enabling resolution like 1973 at some later point.

That draft resolution did receive the nine votes that, absent any vetoes, would have allowed it to pass. It was a notable moment in the dynamics of the world system when China and Russia delivered their vetoes. Brazil, India, South Africa, and Lebanon also abstained during that vote. It is entirely possible that the two veto-wielders-- and possibly the other 'BRICS' members on the Security Council, where by chance all five were present-- were worried about the 'R2P'-derived precedent that the Libyan intervention had set, which might one day be used against any of them. It is possible that many of those BRICS countries found that the way the situation had unfolded in Libya (where the anti-Qadhafi rebels had already seized Tripoli and were exhibiting a notable lack of ability to govern fairly and effectively) was also of great concern to them. And it is possible that for some of them, the sovereignty of Asad's Syria was seen as in some way more deserving of their support than that of Qadhafi's Libya-- especially given Qadhafi's wholesale leap into the pro-western camp in recent years. We should note, however, that South Africa was already strongly opposed, for African-solidarity reasons, to the NATO intervention in Libya; so its failure to support the west's resolution on Syria was really no surprise.

No matter what the motivations of individual BRICS countries, the fact of the Russian and Chinese vetoes changed the calculus of all involved in Syria, making it very clear that no Libya-style, overt western military intervention would be happening there any time soon.

Another development that almost has almost certainly affected the regional environment around Syria has been the resurgence of Kurdish (PKK) anti-regime violence in Turkey. Activating "the Kurdish issue" is something that all those four countries with significant Kurdish populations-- Syria, Iraq, Iran, and Turkey-- know how to do against each other. And of those four countries, probably Turkey, with its in-my-opinion genuine aspirations to move toward greater democracy and its very significant Kurdish population, is more vulnerable to the re-emergence of a "Kurdish issue" than any. Regardless of the nature of any external sponsorship Turkey's Kurdish militants may have received-- and both Iran and Syria have their own separate reasons to have done this-- the re-emergence of PKK violence was doubtless a huge headache for Ankara.

In the end, though, in the aftermath of the failure of the western move at the Security Council, it was the Arab League, not Turkey, that stepped in to explore the possibilities for brokering a negotiated end to Syria's internal strife. An Arab League delegation arrived in Damascus yesterday. It was greeted by large pro-Asad demonstrations in the capital and some reported instances of anti-Asad strikes being observed in Homs and other cities.

(One word of warning to the Arab League negotiators: Remember the fate of Gamal Abdel-Nasser, 41 years ago.)

The commentary that the FT's Roula Khalaf had on the Arab League mission yesterday is probably worth reading. She wrote:

Qatar, the exceedingly wealthy autocracy which has emerged as the unlikely champion of the oppressed across the Arab world, is leading the delegation, despite initial grumbles from Damascus. But the six-member mission also includes Egypt, Oman, Algeria and Yemen...

Needless to say the presence of the foreign minister of Yemen on the delegation to Damascus should reassure Assad. In fact, Sana’a could give the Syrian strongmen some good advice – namely to take a page out of Saleh’s book and pretend to agree to Arab initiatives without implementing any of their stipulations...

The whole point of the Arab League mission is also puzzling. The foreign ministers are giving Assad and the Syrian opposition two weeks to hold a national dialogue. But, as many diplomats in the Arab world know, if such a meeting were ever to take place – and it is unlikely – it will be based on a reform plan that seems to be unworkable. Assad is not about to agree to share power with the opposition. And after nearly seven months of atrocities, the Syrian national council, the umbrella opposition group, is not about compromise with the regime or wait, as the plan suggests, until 2013 to have free presidential elections.

Diplomats tell me that the Arab League has no choice but to tread carefully when it comes to Syria, which is far too important strategically and still has a few good friends in the region...

* * *

So, there is a massive amount of geopolitics swirling around-- and often penetrating deeply inside-- the politics of the Arab Spring. And there remains a lot of uncertainty about the outcomes-- in all the Arab countries, and indeed in the region as a whole. Here, though, are some of my preliminary thoughts at this stage:

1. The overwhelmingly peaceable and overwhelmingly civilian mass movements that swept the dictatorships in Tunisia and Egypt from power were unalloyed good news. The outcomes in both those countries may not be as truly wonderful as we might hope. But the peoples of the two countries have provided themselves with a decent chance of being able to build robust and largely accountable and democratic political systems, in place for the repressive systems they have labored under for so many years. Read this account, from JWB's upcoming, Cairo-based author Issandr El-Amrani, on how exhilarating he found Tunisia's recent elections... (Okay, Issandr is less optimistic regarding Egypt. But still, I am sure he would agree with me that the prospects for serious positive political developments there are still far, far greater than any of us would have imagined just one year ago.)

2. The overwhelmingly civilian mass pro-democracy movements in Bahrain and Yemen also been deeply inspiring. Hey-- I never gave a shout-out yet to Yemen's fabulous, inspiring leader Tawakkol Karman for being a co-winner of the Nobel Peace Prize this year. Huge congratulations, Ms. Karman! despite the creativity and commitment of the members of the movements in those two countries, however, both have met serious resistance... And in both cases, that resistance has been supported by Washington. Shame, shame shame! (And something that all of us in the pro-justice movement here in the United States ought to be working hard to reverse.)

3. In Syria and elsewhere there have also been large-scale civilian mass movements taking real risks to fight for political reform. But it's been harder to gauge the real reach and influence of those movements. And in Syria, as in Yemen, there have been serious armed elements involved alongside the unarmed mass movements.

4. Libya has been seen as a real test case for the whole western liberal notion of 'R2P'-- which far too many western liberals take to mean that "international community" (however fuzzily defined) has a prima facie duty to support the human rights of beleaguered peoples in all other countries. Actually, the UN's R2P documents don't say that. They say that governments everywhere have the first duty to protect the the lives and safety of their peoples; but that if they fail to do so, then the UN can step in to take such steps as are deemed necessary to save the peoples' lives. Big difference.

So what we saw in Libya was a UN-allowed, NATO-led military intervention that was launched in the first instance under the rubric of enforcing a no-fly zone over Libya in order to protect the civilians of Benghazi from what was described to us all as a completely certain humanitarian disaster. The western leaders never paid any heed to the facts that-- as I blogged at the time-- the humanitarian situation in Benghazi was actually getting better in the days immediately before their bombings started; or, that the African Union leaders were poised to undertake the kind of tension-deescalating negotiations that resolution 1973 had also specifically called for.

Since March 19, Libya has seen scores of thousands of conflict-related deaths and maimings, and the country's political space has been largely taken over by a clutch of mutually competing armed gangs. It looks very like Iraq in 2006 or so. And in keeping with that "Iraqi" theme, we saw the disgusting scenes of Muammar Qadhafi being brutalized while in captivity and then turning up shortly afterwards having been executed by a gunshot to the head.

Like Iraq before it, what happened in Libya is surely not a "model" for any people-- in the Arab world or elsewhere-- who seek a life of human dignity, security for their families, and accountable governance.

So the "balance sheet" for the Arab Spring is at this point decidedly mixed, but still on balance positive. What is clear is that the social and political forces that were unfrozen by Mohamed Bouazizi (and before him, to be fair, by Khaled Said in Egypt) have set the whole Middle East on a political course whose dynamism still has a lot more unfolding to do.

In upcoming blog posts I plan to examine the effects of the Arab Spring so far on the Palestinian issue; and also (in more depth than previously), on the response of the western media to the Arab Spring. Stay tuned.