A couple of days ago, I sat in on a lecture about Nasser’s foreign policy in the 1950’s-60’s, and the importance of regional axes in the Cold War world. It left me wondering about the extent to which we still live in such a world today, at least as far as Middle East politics are concerned.

This question would have been easier to answer a few years ago, when the region was conveniently divided into “moderates” and “radicals” (or the camps of “resistance” and “surrender”, depending on your perspective.) These days, however, as I noted in a Year in Review piece back in 2009, the divisions are not so straightforward.

Rob Malley and Peter Harling concur. In an excellent op-ed for the Washington Post, they argue that international relations in the Middle East today reflect a far messier reality, one that is full of opportunities for engagement by a superpower that tragically can’t seem to read the writing on the wall. Check out the whole article, but here are some suggestive bits:

Changes over the past few years have blurred the region’s purported lines. Qatar brokered the inter-Lebanese accord in May 2008, while Turkey started to mediate Israeli-Syrian negotiations. Neither country “belongs” to one axis or the other; both have earned reputations for talking to all sides. While Saudi Arabia had long echoed U.S. skepticism and overall objectives regarding Syria, engagement between the two has resumed. Riyadh and Damascus reached common ground in implicitly rebuking any Iranian role in Yemen, much to Tehran’s irritation, and in quietly opposing Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki, who enjoys U.S. support. The Saudis also renewed contact with the Palestinian Islamist movement Hamas after a period of estrangement.

From Syria, too, come interesting signals. Uncomfortable with what had turned into a monogamous affair with Iran, Damascus began courting Qatar, France and, most prominently, Turkey. Deep strategic ties notwithstanding, Damascus and Tehran are waging a discreet proxy war in Iraq, backing different allies and combating different foes. Damascus broke a historic taboo in dispatching an ambassador to Beirut. In Lebanon itself, segments of the two political camps — until recently split in ways that mirrored the militants-vs.-moderates divide — are signaling a desire to reshape the political landscape.

…

Today, the relevant competition in the Middle East is not between a pro-Iranian and a pro-American axis but between two homegrown visions. One, backed by Iran, emphasizes resistance to Israel and the West, speaks to the region’s thirst for dignity and prioritizes military cooperation. The other, symbolized by Turkey, highlights diplomacy, stresses engagement with all parties and values economic integration. Both outlooks are championed by non-Arab emerging regional powers and resonate with an Arab street as incensed by Israel as it is weary of its own leaders.

These developments, Malley and Harling argue, are remarkable, and yet have largely gone unnoticed by the Obama Administration, which is still stuck in the rigid “moderates-versus-militants” paradigm of its predecessor. The Leveretts make a similar plea for more engagement with Iran and Syria by the White House, while plenty of others believe that the engagement policy has proven to be a complete failure (see here and here).

Meanwhile, the issue of regional axes has recently come up again in Lebanon, with Amin Gemayel reportedly asking (at the national dialogue talks) whether Lebanon should be a “confrontation” state or a “neutral” one, vis-a-vis the conflict with Israel. Here’s Michel Aoun’s response (which is, more or less, that Lebanon has no choice but to be a confrontation state because it is directly targeted by Israel), and here’s a piece by Walid Maalouf arguing that neutrality is Lebanon’s only hope.

Finally, see Nick Blanford’s short piece on the national dialogue talks for the Christian Science Monitor.

Today, Lebanon launched the first session of its much-anticipated “national dialogue” talks. The meeting, held under the auspices of President Michel Suleiman at the Presidential Palace in Baabda, lasted two hours, and everyone who is anyone was there: Hariri, Jumblatt, Aoun, Geagea, Frangieh, Raad (representing Nasrallah), etc.

In most other countries, two hours would be plenty of time for a substantive meeting between political leaders. The way Aaron Sorkin tells it, billions of dollars and thousands of U.S. troops are moved across the globe in the time it takes to walk from Josh Lyman’s office down the hall to the coffee maker.

In Lebanon, though, two hours is apparently just enough time for everyone to arrive fashionably late, greet each other while exchanging news and pleasantries, have coffee, smoke a cigar, and agree to adjourn the talks until a to-be-determined date in the future.

After all, here’s what happened the last time they got together.

(For those of you reading via RSS, be sure to click the link to come over and vote on the importance of this initiative for addressing Lebanon’s “national defense strategy”).

If you’d like to know what I was going to talk about, you could do worse than to read this article in The Review, which, as it happens, I managed to finish just in the nick of time.

Here’s are the first couple of paragraphs and a link to the rest of the story. Come back over here to comment.

**

The End of Political Confessionalism in Lebanon?

Elias Muhanna | March 4 2010

Last month, Lebanon’s Speaker of Parliament, Nabih Berri, called for the creation of a committee. Across the land of the cedars, eyebrows rose and pulses quickened.

For this was to be no ordinary committee. Its task, Berri explained, would be to explore the notion of abolishing Lebanon’s system of political confessionalism, in which government posts are divided among the country’s 18 officially recognised religious communities, according to a decades-old formula. Calling the current system a source of corruption and instability, Berri – who heads the Shiite political party Amal – insisted that abolishing it was a “national duty” mandated by the Lebanese Constitution.

Berri’s rather modest proposal immediately provoked a display of unctuous outrage from Lebanon’s Christian politicians. Under the existing framework, seats in parliament are divided equally between Christians and Muslims, despite the fact that the Christian population of Lebanon has fallen well below 50 per cent over the past half-century. Replacing confessionalism with a more democratic system would almost certainly erode the number of Christian elected officials, which is why even Berri’s Christian allies wasted no time in quietly distancing themselves from the idea. Meanwhile, his opponents were outspoken in their rejection of the proposal, many pointing out the irony of a man they consider a corrupt, dyed-in-the-wool confessional leader and former warlord portraying himself as a born-again democrat. Even Lebanon’s active civil society, for whom deconfessionalism is a perennial cause célèbre, sniffed condescendingly at the initiative, leaving it to die a quiet death in a handful of newspaper editorials.

Moves to eliminate political confessionalism in Lebanon have a long history of failure, dating back to the earliest days of the republic. Leftist political parties and secularists advocated for the abolition of the system in the 1950s and 1960s, and the Taif Agreement (which ended the country’s 15-year civil war) called explicitly for the establishment of a non-confessional bicameral legislature, a demand that has gone unheeded for two decades.

(Keep reading)

As far as I know, the event is still on, so if you were planning on going before, you should still go to hear Jared Cohen and Mona Yacoubian speak about Lebanese affairs. I’ll update this page if I hear that the event is off.

There’s a chance that I’ll be back in DC in May for another event in the spring (details TBA).

There’s something deeply puzzling about this man. Until recently, I was perfectly willing to call him shrewd, but I can’t help but wonder if he isn’t perhaps too clever by half. In 2008, immediately after the signing of the Doha Accord (which was widely portrayed in the international media as an unambiguous victory for Syria’s allies in Lebanon), al-Assad announced that Syria was engaged in peace negotiations with Israel. The timing of the announcement seemed deliberately calculated to restore a kind of balance: it was a signal to the U.S. and Europe that Syria was willing to play ball as long as its interests were protected.

Over the weekend, al-Assad executed another one of his signature swerves when, shortly after meeting with the American envoy, he hosted both Mahmoud Ahmadinejad and Hassan Nasrallah for a dinner at his palace in Damascus (which, you can bet, probably serves the most delicious food in the Levant). Again, the event seemed designed to keep everybody guessing, although Abdul-Bari Atwan has suggested that the whole purpose of the meeting was to secure Syria’s support to join in a war against Israel, should Iran’s nuclear facilities be bombed.

One wonders how long this balancing act can be sustained, or whether it is likely to yield any strategic returns. I can appreciate Bashar’s desire to accumulate as many cards as he can, but at some point, surely he has to start playing those cards. What happens then? Will he be on a conference call to Ahmadinejad and Mash`al whispering sweet nothings even as he signs a peace deal on the White House lawn?

Certainly Walid al-Mu`allim (Syria’s Foreign Minister) sees no contradictions in his country’s tightrope policy and has no problem envisioning a Syrian embassy in Tel Aviv. Meanwhile, some partisans of the Free Patriotic Movement were disturbed by the sight of Hassan Nasrallah representing Lebanon at a meeting of presidents.

In other news, my buddy Sean has written an excellent piece about Martin Kramer’s proposal to force Palestinians to stop having babies.

Finally, I’ll be in Washington this Friday, speaking at a briefing on Capitol Hill along with Jared Cohen (State Department) and Mona Yacoubian (U.S. Institute of Peace), co-sponsored by the Safadi Foundation and the Project on Middle East Democracy. My stats tell me that a fair number of you people are based in the seat of empire, so if you are in the neighborhood and free at 11am, come on down.

Lebanese President Michel Sleiman just returned from a productive trip to Russia. Apparently, he modified Lebanon’s earlier request for a fleet of MiG-29’s, replacing them with an order for several Mi-24 attack helicopter gunships. A sensible idea, to my mind, given the fact that a MiG-29 can fly the length of Lebanon in 6 minutes, whereas a Mi-24 can actually be used for something relevant to Lebanon’s security needs. See here for a history of the Mi-24’s combat history; the closest American-made equivalent would probably be the UH-60 Blackhawk.

And speaking of the U.S., the Pentagon is planning to outfit the Lebanese Air Force with Hawker-Beechcraft AT-6’s (see above left). Don’t sneer.

Also, I recommend this piece by Mitch Prothero in The National, about the infamous Hezbollah helicopter shooting incident. Apparently, the accident was the result of an ignored warning by the Lebanese Army. Here’s an excerpt, but be sure to read the whole thing.

The army officer also blamed the army’s lack of proper communications equipment.

“We aren’t sophisticated enough on the subtle things, like secure communications lines. Hizbollah has a secure fibre optic network connecting all its major bases. We have telephones. During the [2008] siege of Nahr Bared [refugee camp], we realised that most of our guys were using mobile phones to plan military operations.”

Mr Goksel agrees, arguing that even if given the proper information, a Lebanese soldier might face a choice between relaying the important information over an unsecure line, almost certainly monitored by the Israelis, and doing nothing at all.

“Imagine a young officer learns that Hizbollah says to stay away from a field because they have intelligence that Israel might attack it,” he said. “If that officer only has a telephone that everyone knows the Israelis closely monitor, he’d be committing treason to call his headquarters in Beirut to warn them that Hizbollah thinks an Israeli attack could be coming and to get rid of the choppers. Imagine that choice?”

Finally, Joshua Landis has an interesting round-up of the fall-out of Ahmadinejad and Nasrallah’s meeting with Bashar al-Asad in Damascus.

Click to enlarge

Information International, the polling and research firm that publishes The Monthly, one of my favorite publications  about Lebanese politics and economics, released the results of an interesting survey in January on the subject of abolishing confessionalism in Lebanon.

I was traveling at the time and never had a chance to blog about it, but I’ve put together a graph of some of the most relevant figures. Click the graphic to the right to enlarge it.

Update: This is the full text (PDF) of the article about the poll that was published in as-Safir. It contains additional information about the study, including figures for other sects.

Thanks to the wonderfully talented Maya Zankoul for the illustrations. For previous collaborations between Qifa Nabki and Maya, click here.

As Michael Young points out in his column in The Daily Star today, there’s a decent chance that Lebanon will soon find itself in a bit of a tight spot vis-à-vis the proposed UN resolution to sanction Iran.

Apparently, Obama administration officials believe that they can persuade China to get onboard, which would then put the resolution to a vote in the UN Security Council. Lebanon is currently the Arab representative, and Young’s point is that this issue has the potential to severely test the unity of Saad al-Hariri’s young administration:

If Lebanon votes in favor of a sanctions resolution, it will incur the wrath of Hizbullah; if it votes against a resolution, it risks provoking the ire of Arab states who want to see Iran contained, above all Saudi Arabia. And if Lebanon announces beforehand that it will abstain, the decision, if poorly promoted diplomatically, might provoke criticism that it is being wishy-washy, while the permanent Security Council members will be angry not to have the sole Arab representative supporting them. A choice to abstain could also lead to politicization of the vote issue, which would be used as leverage against Hariri and his majority, not least by a Syrian regime that relishes playing on Lebanese contradictions for its own political benefit.

What are Lebanon’s options? The only realistic option is for Beirut to very carefully prepare the ground for regional and international acceptance of a Lebanese abstention. Voting for or against a sanctions resolution will only split the government, and the country, forcing a confrontation that can only be resolved through the compromise of an abstention.

Just because Lebanon is damned-if-it-does, damned-if-it-doesn’t, that don’t mean you can’t vote! See the poll above.

Update: See here for the International Crisis Group’s briefing paper about China’s attitudes regarding the Iranian nuclear issue.

What began as an apparent mistranslation of Ehud Barak’s remarks regarding Israel’s peace negotiations with Syria has snowballed into the clearest possible articulation of a new strategic posture by Syria and Hezbollah towards Israel.

Let’s rewind the tape to last week.

On February 1st, Ehud Barak made some remarks at an IDF gathering, saying something to the effect that if Syria and Israel did not resume peace negotiations in the near future, sooner or later the two countries would find themselves at war. It was a potshot aimed at Netanyahu and his hawkish cohort, who have refused to pick up where Olmert left off with Bashar al-Assad in late 2008.

Two days later, Syria’s Foreign Minister Walid al-Mouallem responded to Barak’s remarks, reading them as a declaration of war:

“One day you threaten Gaza, next day you threaten Lebanon, later Iran and now Syria,” Mouallem said at the news conference with his Spanish counterpart.

“Don’t test, you Israelis, the determination of Syria. You know that war this time would move to your cities. Come to your senses and choose the road of peace. This path is clear,” Mouallem warned.

Of course, we all know what happened next. The following day, Avigdor Lieberman donned his bouncer’s outfit and announced at a business conference that “Assad should know that if he attacks, he will not only lose the war. Neither he nor his family will remain in power.”

And so it goes. Washington has sought to calm the waters, in light of the fact that a new U.S. ambassador to Syria is supposed to be appointed imminently. But Nasrallah’s speech this evening will ensure that the flare-up will continue to be stoked in the press for at least another week or so. Here’s the takeaway:

في لبنان بنية تحتية وفي فلسطين أيضاً، نحن لدينا مطار ونصف وهم لديهم مطارات، نحن لدينا بعض محطات الكهرباء وهم لديهم محطات كبرى، لديهم مصاف للنفط ونحن بعض المصاف، البنية التحتية في اسرائيل أهم من البنية التحتية لدينا، أقول اليوم لهم ما يلي، ويمكنهم التأكد من هذه المعطيات: إذا ضربتم مطار الشهيد رفيق الحريري الدولي في بيروت سنضرب مطار بن غوريون في تل أبيب. إذا ضربتم موانئنا سنقصف موانئكم، وإذا ضربتم مصافي النفط عندنا أو قصفتم مصانعنا سنقصف مصانعكم ومصافي نفطكم. أنا اليوم، في ذكرى السيد عباس والشيخ راغب والحاج عماد أعلن وأقبل هذا التحدي نحن في لبنان شعب ومقاومة وجيش وطني قادرون بقوة لأن نحمي بلدنا ولسنا بحاجة لأحد في هذا العالم ليحمي لبنان

“In Lebanon there is infrastructure, and in [occupied] Palestine as well. We have an airport and they have airports. We have power plants and they have very large ones. They have oil refineries and we do too. The infrastructure in Israel is much more advanced than ours. Today, I hereby tell them the following, and they can be assured of it: If you strike Rafiq al-Hariri International Airport in Beirut, we will strike Ben Gurion Airport in Tel Aviv. If you strike our ports, we will strike your ports. And if you strike our refineries or our factories we will strike your factories and your refineries. Today, in the memory of Sayyed Abbas and Shaykh Raghib and al-Hajj Imad, I announce and accept this challenge. We, in Lebanon, as a people and a resistance and a national army are capable [of this] because we protect our country and we don’t need anyone in the world to protect Lebanon.”

There you have it. The rules have officially changed. Prior to 2000, Israel and Hezbollah operated according to an unspoken set of “tit-for-tat” conventions.  The July 2006 war and the Gaza war that followed it changed the rulebook, ushering in the new “Boss Has Gone Mad” strategy, with all of its attendant carnage.

Tonight, Nasrallah articulated Hezbollah’s response. Coupled with al-Mouallem’s vow to take the war to Israel’s cities, it seems we are finally getting an inkling of how a catastrophic war between the three countries might unfold.

Why now? Was this all really prompted by a misunderstanding of Barak’s remarks? I somehow doubt it. Messages between Israel and Syria rarely get lost in translation. More likely, to me, are the following scenarios: (a) Syria is trying to push the peace talks back onto the Obama administration’s radar screen, after more than a year of complete stagnation and frustration on such matters; or (b) Syria may be worried that the U.S. and Israel are getting closer to a strike on Iran, given the recent concordance with Russia, China, and Europe to target the Revolutionary Guards.

Then again, it may simply have been a case of crossed wires. Your thoughts?