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Politics : Formerly About Advanced Micro Devices -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Elroy who wrote (224264)	3/16/2005 12:49:01 AM
From: i-node	Respond to of 1574059

>> With whom are you debating this subject? Not you. Anymore.

To: Elroy who wrote (224264)	3/16/2005 3:01:48 AM
From: tejek	Respond to of 1574059

Freedom fable ignores 'Party of God' as Mideast spoiler When I was a young boy in the Beirut of the early 1970s, my grandfather would take me on Sundays to Martyrs Square, in the center of the city, so I could enjoy a bus ride in those French-made Saviem, beige and with a red stripe running across their flank, and a kaake, a uniquely Lebanese treat maybe comparable to a hollowed-out sesame bagel, with thyme in its warm core. The palm-contoured square, named for protesters of Ottoman rule who were hanged there in 1916, was the most manic spot in the city. It was permanently gridlocked with the din of market traffic -- vehicular, pedestrian, verbal, every inch a haggle and every breath an intoxicant of scents floating on the breeze of the Mediterranean. Looking at them in their country's favorite sandbox, it was inconceivable to imagine the Lebanese mustering time or energy for anything else but the interchangeable joy of commerce and life they were born for. But they did. They self-destructed, eagerly, as any people would in the properly infectious circumstances. For the Lebanese it was religious tribalism at home mixing with the exploitative ambitions of neighbors -- Palestinian, Syrian, Israeli. By the time Palestinians and Israelis were finished with Lebanon, the place was a ruin typified by what remained of Martyrs Square, which was nothing at all. A flatland to go with Lebanon's flatline. But there's always been something feline in the resilience of the Lebanese. When I returned for a visit five years ago, Martyrs Square was still waiting its turn at redevelopment, but everything else around it had been rebuilt. Visiting that rebuilt but ghostly town center in 2000, I was strongly advised not to take pictures within sight of Syrian roadblocks, whose anorexic soldiers pimpled the city like an arrested scene from my adolescence. What, I wondered, were they protecting? Themselves, mostly. But with them there, would places like Martyrs Square ever regain their exhilarating jumble again? The answer was provided by the assassination last month of Rafik Hariri, the Donald Trumpish real estate billionaire and former prime minister whose monopolies and creative corruptions almost single-handedly rebuilt the city. Hariri was an Arabist whose four prime ministerships since 1991 had been enabled by the Syrians. But he was also a Lebanese patriot, meaning a businessman whose commercial instincts were being constrained by them. His switch to the opposition swayed moderates his way, along with (most likely) a Syrian assassin. The boot-the-Syrians-out demonstrations that followed Hariri's murder almost united all Lebanese for the first time in memory -- Sunni Muslims, Druse, Christians -- and provoked the peaceful downfall of a government of Syrian lackeys along the way. Absent from those demonstrations were Lebanon's Shiites, the largest single sect in the country, and the sect traditionally ignored, with relish, by Christians, Druse and Sunnis alike. That ignorance explains the rise of Hezbollah, the ruthless but perfectly opportunistic "Party of God." Hezbollah has an affinity for terrorism. But it also has legitimacy. It "resisted" Israel's occupation of South Lebanon and has kept out Palestinian militants. And it has clout. It is the party of vacuums: It goes places others snub, sweetening its totalitarian methods with honest-to-goodness social services former governments never bothered with. The Hezbollah factor is the kind of wrinkle in Mideastern politics that makes America's Reader's Digest interpretation of the region, from President Bush's invasion of Iraq to the media's ongoing fictionalization of "People Power" in the Middle East, look like the simplicity it is. Hezbollah managed massive pro-Syrian counter-demonstrations in Beirut last week. For whatever pitiful reasons, busloads of Syrian pinch-runners included, the demonstrations were larger than the Lebanese opposition had managed. They restored the Syrian-backed government. Lebanon's flirtations with true independence proved as premature as those purple fingers in Baghdad, where mass graves and suicide bombings keep coloring Iraqi society black. This is not to say that Arabs aren't craving freedom, only that the self-congratulatory narrative that's been clogging up our media for the past few weeks is nowhere near the fairy tale it's being made out to be. But as Scheherazade would say at the end of her allotted column space, that's a story for another day. Tristam is a News-Journal editorial writer. Reach him at ptristam@att.net. news-journalonline.com