Middle East history lesson for the day

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Since the ME is an integral part of current day polilics, I believe the participants of this forum will find the following article by Rober Kaplan interesting. I discovered it to be filled with historical fact and succinctly encapsulated knowledge gained by the author over a lifetime of area study and reporting. I hope you enjoy it as much as I did.

THE NEW MIDEAST

Nonstop Turbulence
Rather than Iraq, it could be Syria that ends up collapsing.

BY ROBERT D. KAPLAN
Sunday, March 20, 2005 12:01 a.m. EST

Between the creation of the State of Israel in 1948 and the toppling of Saddam Hussein's regime in Iraq in 2003 the political geography of the Middle East remained mostly fixed in the Cold War ice. Vast social, demographic and economic changes that swept through the region for decades barely registered upon its highly centralized dictatorships, run by emergency laws enacted as far back as the 1950s. By leveling one of these regimes, and then brazenly confronting the insurgency that followed, President George W. Bush has set the other regimes in motion for the first time in half a century. Democracy doesn't begin to describe the changes that will follow, as the geographic realities of older eras reassert themselves.

Certainly, democracy has turned out to be a more potent force for change in the region than many analysts--myself included--had suspected. Whereas students in Lebanon used to interpret freedom in terms of Sunni Arab nationalism, they now do so in terms of the democratic revolution in Ukraine. But the weakening of old dictatorships will bring into question the integrity of some of these states themselves, which have survived without turmoil only through the discipline imposed by internal security services.

Indeed, rather than Iraq, it could be Syria that ends up collapsing. Syria's pan-Arabism was a substitute for its weak identity as a state. Greater Syria was an Ottoman era geographical expression that included present-day Lebanon, Jordan and Israel-Palestine, to which the truncated borders of the current Syrian state do great violence. Ever since France sundered Lebanon from Syria in 1920, the Syrians have been desperate to get it back. The total Syrian withdrawal from Lebanon--that President Bush is demanding--will undermine the very political foundation of the minority Alawite regime of Bashar al-Assad, whose own ethnic group spills over into both countries and whose political survival depends on proving that he is a better Syrian nationalist than the majority Sunnis.

Syria is but a Levantine version of the former Yugoslavia--without the intellectual class which that other post-Ottoman state could claim at the time of its break-up (since Hafez al-Assad's rule was so much more stultifying than Tito's). In Syria, as in the former Yugoslavia, each sect and religion has a specific geography. Aleppo in the north is a bazaar city with greater historical links to Mosul and Baghdad than to Damascus. Between Aleppo and Damascus is the increasingly Islamist Sunni heartland. Between Damascus and the Jordanian border are the Druze. Free and fair elections in 1947, 1949 and 1954 exacerbated these divisions by dividing the vote along sectarian lines. Hafez al-Assad came to power in 1970 after 21 changes of government in the previous 24 years. For three decades he was the Leonid Brezhnev of the Arab world, staving off the future while failing to build a national consciousness by virtue of a suffocating and calcifying tyranny. The question is: As President Bush humiliates Assad's son-and-successor into weakness, will Syria become a larger version of Civil War-era Lebanon?

The implications of this for neighboring Lebanon and Jordan are vast. A weakened Syria could mean the emergence of Beirut as the cultural and economic capital of Greater Syria, with Damascus finally paying the price for its decades-long, Soviet-like removal from the modern world. Of course, Greater Syria would not be a new state, but once again a vague geographical expression as in Ottoman times.

Jordan would survive such a cataclysm better than many suppose, because the Hashemite dynasty--unlike the Alawite one--has spent decades building a state consciousness through the development of a unified national elite. Amman is filled with ex-government ministers loyal to the Jordanian monarchy--people who were not imprisoned or killed as a result of cabinet reshuffles, but who were merely allowed to become rich. Jordan's problem, however, will be the integration of its urban Palestinian majority, once it feels the pull of the new Palestinian state to materialize from negotiations between Prime Ministers Ariel Sharon and Mahmoud Abbas.

The weakening of Syria cannot bode well for its regional ally Iran, now virtually surrounded by pro-American governments in Iraq and Afghanistan, and new democracies to the north in places like Georgia. When the Shah fell in 1979 and was replaced by Ayatollah Khomeini, one strong and well-organized bureaucratic fear machine replaced another, as the Shiite clerisy--due to its highly defined hierarchal nature--already constituted a state within a state. But the next political evolution in Iran must lead to a weaker and less centralized polity--opening a Pandora's box of ethnic issues in the north related to the Azeri Turks, Turkomans and others who straddle the border between Iran and the former Soviet Union.

Throughout much of history, Iran has been less a state than an amorphous empire, reflecting the richness and dynamism of Persian culture. Once Iran is liberated from the mullahs' puritanical and religious straitjacket, which has little appeal in neighboring Central Asian republics (where vodka is drunk in liberal amounts), Greater Persia could resurface in a cultural sense, even as Tehran's ability to project power contracts.

Think of the changes that would unfold from a democratic evolution in the Arab and Persian worlds as the Mexicanization of the Middle East: Rather than one-party rule with only a few men in control, there would be a whole political class of people who would need to be influenced in each country, in order for American diplomats to make progress on one issue after another. Weak states mean more work for diplomats, but not anarchy necessarily. There would be so many internal problems to keep parliaments busy that hatred of the United States would recede--especially if such a democratic evolution happened coterminously with a Palestinian-Israeli peace deal-of-sorts.

Democratization means non-stop turbulence. To think Arabs are incapable of democracy is deterministic. But a little bit of determinism in the service of constructive pessimism is indispensable. For example, Central Europe had an easier democratic transition than the Balkans largely because of a Westernized Habsburg and Prussian tradition, associated with a large bourgeoisie, as opposed to the Balkans' more chaotic Ottoman past that featured a large peasantry. Still, compared to the Middle East, even the Balkans represent a wealthier and better governed part of the old Turkish sultanate. Therefore, not to expect trouble across the Middle East--lots of it--would be just as foolish as expecting that our military entry into Iraq would be met with flowers, rather than with guns.

Neoconservatives might have been naive about ground-level, tribalistic realities in places like Iraq, even as they have demonstrated a grasp of how globalization is affecting the region as a whole. When I last spent considerable time in Lebanon in late 1998, an intellectual here and there would talk of how the democratic upheavals in Central Europe should become the guidepost for his own country. Now such comparisons are widespread. Government-controlled media is slowly dying in the Middle East. The media replacing it--young, inexperienced, often irresponsible, and sometimes lethal, as in al-Jazeera's case--is releasing a genie of self-doubt and questioning out of the bottle.

Neoconservatives have intuited this, even as it will take the best Middle East experts to help manage the consequences. The tradition of America's Middle East experts (known as Arabists) is--like that of the neoconservatives--a Wilsonian one. In the Arabists' case, it harkens back to the founding of the American University in Beirut (AUB) in 1866, then called the Syrian Protestant College. Throughout the Cold War, Arabists fostered an appreciation for Wilsonian values at the AUB and elsewhere in the Arab world, seen at the time through the prism of the national aspirations of Sunni Arabs in Palestine. The Arabists believed that Sunni Arabs were just as capable of enlightened self-rule as the Israelis. The Bush administration has taken up this cause not just in Palestine, but across the region. It would be historically and philosophically ironic if the area experts at the State Department were not now in the same camp as the neoconservatives.

Mr. Kaplan, a correspondent for The Atlantic Monthly, is the author, among others, of "Eastward to Tartary: Travels in the Balkans, the Middle East, and the Caucasus" (Vintage, 2001).

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Interesting. Thanks for posting it, Rayban1. (Why the 1?)

How valid are expectations based on a region's peasant, middle-class or intellectual stock when it only takes a generation or two to change? As the article says, there have been surprises.

<"Tell me how this ends." - U. S. Maj. Gen. David Petraeus, 101st Airborne, in Iraq, March 2003>

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Piffka

Thanks for actually reading the article. I don't understand why you enclosed a supposed quote by Gen Petraeus. It is my understanding that he is now a 3 star and in charge of the entire effort to organize and train Iraqi forces which will be key to our withdrawal.

Regarding the (1)........no reason in particular except that it may have been required elsewhere so I merely continued it here without thinking.

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Rayban, I'm surprised no one else has posted. Actually, my post was mostly a "bookmark" so that I could read future comments. Until Israel & the greater Muslim world find some kind of peaceful settlement, I expect we'll all be in trouble in the M.E.

Kaplan also says -- and I'm not sure how this fits with what he is saying in your article, but this seems more optimistic:

Quote:

Our preoccupation with promoting democracy is slightly misplaced. Freer, more historically liberal societies are emerging anyway. Even in the Middle East, the new generation of leaders will not have the luxury to rule as autocratically as the passing one. Tumultuous social and economic change needs to be managed, not ignited.

As for the little quote from General Patraeus -- I think it still fits (despite being two years old) as an expression of the ever-present mess in the M.E. and my continuing despair as to how we'll get out. It was said to be a joking rhetorical question Petraeus frequently asked of the embedded journalist who wrote In the Company of Soldiers, Rick Atkinson. <shrug> It doesn't make me think any less of him, does it you? Sounds like typical cut-to-the-chase black humor that a thinking soldier might make during the beginnings of the war, especially given what Rumsfeld was saying then. It was a crazy time, all told. I'm posting this timeline as a reminder of that one horrible week.

From the AFSC Iraq War Timeline:

Quote:

March 17, 2003- Great Britain's ambassador to the UN says the diplomatic process on Iraq has ended. Arms inspectors evacuate. Pres. George W. Bush gives Saddam Hussein and his sons 48 hours to leave Iraq or face war.

March 19, 2003- Invasion of Iraq begins when the United States launches Operation Iraqi Freedom. Called a "decapitation attack," the initial air strike of the war targets Saddam Hussein and other Iraqi leaders in Baghdad , with unclear results.

March 20, 2003- The United States launches a second round of air strikes against Baghdad , and ground troops enter the country for the first time, crossing into southern Iraq from Kuwait. Sec. of Defense Donald Rumsfeld claims the initial phase of the war is mild compared to what is to come.

"What will follow will not be a repeat of any other conflict. It will be of a force and a scope and a scale that has been beyond what we have seen before."

March 21, 2003- The major phase of the war begins with heavy aerial attacks on Baghdad and other cities, publicized in advance by the Pentagon as an overwhelming barrage meant to instill "shock and awe."

March 24, 2003- Troops march within sixty miles of Baghdad. They encounter much stronger resistance from Iraqi soldiers and paramilitary fighters along the way, particularly in towns such as Nassiriya and Basra.

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Quote:
Our preoccupation with promoting democracy is slightly misplaced. Freer, more historically liberal societies are emerging anyway. Even in the Middle East, the new generation of leaders will not have the luxury to rule as autocratically as the passing one. Tumultuous social and economic change needs to be managed, not ignited.

I had to laugh at this bit in particular......"Tumultuous social and economic change needs to be managed, not ignited. I'm certain Condi Rice would be very interested if Kaplan has any real advice on how to "MANAGE" what is sweeping the middle east right now. How exactly does one "manage" a hurricane or a tidal wave?

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"By leveling one of these regimes, and then brazenly confronting the insurgency that followed" ??

Apparently that's what the electorate in the United States hoped. I think Kaplan considered that a way to ignite the region. But seeing the M.E. as a hurricane or tidal wave is another apt metaphor, Rayban, implying the inevitability of further damages. Is that what you expect?

"Tell me how this ends..."

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The situation in Lebanon is very tenuous right now and could go either way......the anti-syrian forces are trying to force the current puppet gov't out to make way for serious elections.
Syrian and Hezbullah elements could force the country into civil war but with the memory of the last civil war still fairly fresh perhaps they won't go that far. I think Rice is making a serious effort to encourage Hezbullah to stop the violence and join a new gov't. Whether or not Hezbollah see that as being in their best interest remains to be seen. They have been the bully on the block for a long time but Syria had a big hand in that so once Syria is eliminated Hezbollah may really be pinched.

Most of the power brokers are attempting to force the collapse of Syria. If that happens it will greatly enhance the possibility that Lebanon can solve it's own problems.

The collapse of Syria could result in elections there and thus eliminating one of the sources of fresh recruits into Iraq. It would also put more pressure on Iran because they would be more or less isolated as the last big supporter of world terrorism. Of course Saudi Wahabism will still be a contender but the world is at last recognizing that Saudi money is secretly financing the spread of Wahabism.

I view all the current happenings in the ME as very welcome, positive signs that the desire for self determination is sweeping the area and if it develops enough more momentum, the current rulers will be forced to accept it.

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Another great article which adds optimism for the future of Lebanon:

Lebanon is the hotbed of a new, liberal Arab awakening

By Massoud A. Derhally

Tuesday, March 22, 2005

When I came to Lebanon two weeks ago, I watched with awe, and at times envy, as the Lebanese took to the streets striving to recapture the freedom they were robbed of for so long. Their efforts represented to me an epic struggle against the impotence of the Arab world and a condemnation of the failings not only of the Lebanese leadership but that of the Arab world in its entirety.

On my way to a demonstration commemorating the assassination of former Prime Minister Rafik Hariri, I saw Egyptians enthusiastically making their way to Martyrs' Square, where the opposition rallies have been held, all too eager to participate in solidarity with the Lebanese people, but also perhaps out of frustration with the status quo at home.

The winds of change in Lebanon are not necessarily the result of Iraqis and Palestinians going to the polls, or because of U.S. President George W. Bush's manifesto of spreading freedom and democracy in the region. All these variables, while certainly interlinked, are not the overarching causes for the unfolding events. Instead, change is in the air because of a thirst to live a democratic life with dignity, to speak freely, and above all to repudiate the ominous and abhorrent conditions Arabs have lived under since the fall of the Ottoman Empire.

In a sense, what is taking place is a new "Arab awakening" that is different from the one which George Antonius, the historian of Arab nationalism, wrote about decades ago. He concluded that the Arab nationalism that emerged from the Ottoman Empire in the 19th century was influenced by the West. Today, however, the awakening is largely a response to domestic woes and exigencies, and is sparked by a desire to say enough is enough to bankrupt regimes.

Freedom in the Middle East has been assailed on several fronts. The Arab world isn't merely fragile politically, but also economically and socially. Economic growth in the region has stagnated since the 1980s. Why is that? Because despite the presence of oil, the region has been unable to tap adequately into the integrated world economy or attract foreign direct investment. These are the conclusions of the Arab human development reports published by the United Nations Development Program (UNDP), and of reports published by the World Economic Forum.

They show that poverty, gender inequality, extra-judicial killings, arbitrary arrests, increasing unemployment, a deficiency in human rights, religious extremism, lack of innovation and the implementation of education curricula that encourage nothing but rote learning is what the Arab world is all about today.

These documents, which should have galvanized Arab governments to do more to empower their people, have, instead, largely been ignored. There is still no conscious drive in the region toward pluralism or establishing full-fledged democratic systems, where people can credibly participate in governing themselves. Yes, Arab governments have implemented bits and pieces of reform of late, but this has been cosmetic and used to deflect criticism and avoid dealing with the real issues. Bush is right when he speaks about the need for Arab leaders to address fundamental deficiencies in their countries.

This month, the UNDP is expected to release its third report on the Arab world, in which it addresses the pervasive lack of good governance throughout the region. The dynamics on the ground are changing, but the impotence that has pervaded the region for so long and continues to hold development hostage can no longer be attributed to U.S. hegemony or to Israel. Arab societies are in an evolving tug of war. That's why what is happening in Lebanon is historic by all proportions. America is right to encourage the emergence of a strong, democratic, free and independent Lebanon. But it should leave it to the Lebanese people, who have thus far exhibited more courage than any of their Arab brethren, to decide their own future.

Lebanon is today the flowerbed of hope in the Arab world, and has been and remains the only country in the region displaying the characteristics of a democracy. If the courageous Lebanese people succeed in their struggle for self-determination they will make it all the harder for other autocratic regimes in the region to pursue the continued subjugation of their own people. What the world is seeing in Lebanon today is a rude Arab awakening - the coming of a new dawn.

Massoud Derhally is a former correspondent of Agence France Presse and is the

business and diplomatic editor of a Dubai-based magazine. The views expressed here are his own. He wrote this commentary for THE DAILY STAR.

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Nice article Rayban! Though I am not as optimistic about Lebanon given developments there.

Quote:

Freedom in the Middle East has been assailed on several fronts. The Arab world isn't merely fragile politically, but also economically and socially. Economic growth in the region has stagnated since the 1980s. Why is that? Because despite the presence of oil, the region has been unable to tap adequately into the integrated world economy or attract foreign direct investment. These are the conclusions of the Arab human development reports published by the United Nations Development Program (UNDP), and of reports published by the World Economic Forum.

The real problem with investment in the Middle East is that so much of the money that is funnelled into the countries is funnelled right back out to European and American markets and not into the local economies.

This has the effect of styming foreign investment as there simply isn't as much captial floating around the countries as one would think. It's quite odd that we give so much money to countries who remain so incredibly poor overall....

Cycloptichorn

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Another optimistic article concerning the fresh wind of freedom that is sweeping the ME. This one is from Gulfnews.com and is written by a Muslim.

Mass movement is accelerating the process of revolution

By Youssef M. Ibrahim, Special to Gulf News
These are great times in Arab lands. In multiple countries millions are daring to imagine a future radically different from the past. Imagination is a dangerous thing, thrilling and infectious.

When it runs amok, revolution is never far behind and from the shores of Tripoli to the Gulf of Arabia, it appears indeed revolution has landed.

Just a few weeks ago, would anyone have possibly imagined in Lebanon the sight of Syrian soldiers packing jeeps, armoured cars, shutting down so-called intelligence offices, tucking tails between legs, rushing out in the darkness that precedes dawn?

It is more than imagination now.

It is happening. Could anyone have imagined that an upstart opposition movement in Egypt that called itself kifaya Arabic for "enough'' would grow strong enough to disrupt President Hosni Mubarak's hopes of a dynastic rule where his son Jamal succeeds him, surely, as the next ruler over 70 million Egyptians?

Well, guess what?

That little kifaya movement has now cast enough serious doubts over succession that Jamal as well as the entire superstructure of men who have ruled the largest Arab country since 1952 can no longer count on another half a century monopoly.

Picture frame after picture frame on the canvass what is surfacing is an Arab landscape in revolt, fears melting away, people turning suppressed frustrations into action.

A few weeks ago would it have occurred that women in Kuwait would hit the streets in demonstrations demanding the right to vote, or that a senior Saudi royal family figure such as Foreign Minister Prince Saud Al Faisal would publicly pledge Saudi women will get the right to vote as well?

And only three years ago, would anyone have imagined that Al Qaida's princes of darkness, the same folks who strutted about after blowing up the World Trade Centre murdering thousands of innocents, would today be on the run everywhere in Afghanistan, Western Europe and Saudi Arabia, tracked, arrested, fleeing, scared, falling one after the other, their funds frozen, their cobwebs and culture of murder teetering ? That is happening too.

Today's terror organisation, Al Qaida, is nothing more than a shadow of its former self. One can imagine that in a couple of years it will spoken of as a thing of the past.

The "Imagine Revolt'' is gathering the force of a snowball rolling down that mountain. The blind and the mighty are tumbling in a way that removes more constraints to further imagination in Iraq, Lebanon, Jordan and tomorrow in Syria too.

Back in 2002, would anyone have imagined that by 2005 Saddam Hussain, the most ruthless dictator in modern Arab history a man who boiled his critics in acid, gassed his own people would be now lingering in a small cell at one of his former Baghdad palaces.

Saddam, the fierce, Saddam the invincible, is growing a tree in the backyard of that cell, awaiting a trial which will sentence him to die.

Outside Saddam's palaces, Iraqis are electing a parliament, erecting a government, no matter how imperfect.

And Arab people are learning to bargain over power, constructing a life beyond tyranny. Eventually those same Iraqis will end American occupation too. Have no doubt of that. Once free, a people can imagine and do anything.

Amazement

Over on the West wing of the Arab world, one watches with amazement as the one and only, the great leader of the Great Libyan Popular Socialist Jamahiriya I believe that is the last official name of Libya the unique leader Muammar Al Gaddafi, has turned into an "informant'' to Western intelligence services, singing like a canary, delivering tonnes of evidence against his various terrorist friends from the Irish Republican Army to the Abu Nidal group he once adopted and armed.

This is a transformation that defies imagination. It isn't finished.

So far, Gaddafi acknowledged he ordered the shooting down of two civilian planes one American and one French killing 500 innocents. He agreed to pay compensations left and right. He vowed to abandon his previous politics in the hope of hanging on to his present position.

Yet, last week Saudi Arabia and the United States have officially accused him of plotting to kill Crown Prince Abdullah of Saudi Arabia in 2003 and are now preparing to unroll official indictments for a second round of Gaddafi hunting.

Imagine what is next: Libyan opponents in exile will dig out those lists of hundreds who have disappeared, were assassinated or still linger in jail. I imagine it will only end with the regime falling.

Far fetched, you say? Not anymore.

Above all, imagine where the Lebanese snowball, now rolling, will stop. This small Arab people of 4 million living inside Lebanon and 10 million outside are roaring like lions. And 250 million other Arabs are watching in awe.

Lebanese Christians, Shiites and Druze started out demanding the truth over who murdered their Sunni Muslim leader, former Prime Minister Rafik Hariri on February 14.

What they got was beyond imagining. They eyeballed Syria into ending its 30 years of occupation. They toppled one prime minister who was a Syrian puppet, they destabilised the whole apparatus of the secret Lebanese police and are about to topple their president.

Before they are done, they will have created a model of peaceful revolt or ignited an armed one.

The United States, France and the United Nations all heard Lebanon's cry and are standing by, preparing to crush any Syrian attempt to interfere again. Iraq replayed? Nothing is impossible.

Still many among Arabs, paralysed by years of tyranny, believe all this is a passing phenomena, that rulers accustomed to engineering repression will prevail.

That is missing the bigger picture: those rulers are now seriously off balance; the times are different and today's world stands firmly with those rising in anger.

As the Arab saying goes, "the thread has split''. Those worry beads are scattering all over the floor, beyond anyone's control. There is nothing beyond the realm of imagination.

Youssef M. Ibrahim, a former Middle East correspondent for the New York Times and Energy Editor of the Wall Street Journal, is Managing Director of the Dubai-based Strategic Energy Investment Group. He can be contacted at [email protected]

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This excellent article is from the Christian Science Monitor. The Sunniis of Iraq want to participate in the gov't but have thorny demands

Sunnis now want to join Iraq politics
Sunni leaders met last weekend to unite in their cause and negotiate with Shiites and Kurds.
By Jill Carroll | Correspondent of The Christian Science Monitor
BAGHDAD - Two years after war dramatically changed Iraq's political landscape, the former ruling minority Sunnis are developing plans to participate in a government formed by elections they boycotted.

In a significant shift, several Sunni groups that hitherto shunned the political process met last weekend to create a unified front and set of demands that they will present to the Shiite and Kurdish leaders now hammering out a new government.

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The meeting was a reversal for Sunni leaders who have supported insurgents and urged US troops to leave Iraq immediately.

The new effort, observers say, appears to be an admission that their strategy - to stop Iraq's election and denounce the formation of a new government - has failed. Bringing the former ruling class into Iraq's emerging power structure, they add, could help quell the insurgency.

"Participation of the Sunnis is both religiously important and politically important," says John Esposito, a professor at Georgetown University who specializes in Islam and international affairs. "It can establish a precedent for other Sunni leaders to become involved."

The significance of the conference was underscored by its attendees. Participants included members of the Muslim Scholars Association, a group of Sunni religious leaders, among them some of the most extreme figures who have influence with the insurgency.

Also present were leaders from cities in the "Sunni Triangle," including Mosul, Haditha, and Salam Pak, which is bubbling with insurgent activity. Representatives of Waqaf Sunna, the powerful administrating body of Sunni religious affairs, attended as well.

Need for street credibility

Some Sunnis have previously tried to assert themselves as representatives of the diverse minority. Returned exile Adnan Pachachi, current vice president Ghazi Yawar, and some members of the Islamic Party formed a coalition a few weeks ago.

But their group has little, if any, credibility because it does not share the strong anti-occupation sentiments of most Sunnis or hold sway over the insurgency.

"For the past two years, there has been no real representative of the Sunnis in Iraq. Now there is a real attempt to form a representative of all Sunnis," says Ibnayan al-Jarba, who helped organize the meeting. "The security situation in general will not improve if [the new political leaders] do not hear from us. We have a direct effect on the [Sunnis] in the street."

Mr. Jarba says a group was chosen at the meeting to fan out among Sunni tribal, religious, and political leaders in the next few weeks to solidify a base of Sunni support and then begin talks with Shiite and Kurd leaders about their demands.

Jarba says that includes a meeting this weekend with Harith al-Dhari, a leader of the Muslim Scholars Association, which eschews political participation.

"There is a lot matching in our ideas and the Muslim Scholars Association," Jarba says.

The sudden activity in the Sunni community, explains former election candidate Sherif Ali bin al-Hussein, will start a path toward negotiations that will eventually call for a laying down of arms in exchange for inclusion in the power structure.

"We are trying to exploit the [post-election] trauma of the Sunnis coming face-to-face with the loss of their power," says Mr. Hussein, who failed to win a seat but is trying now, as a Sunni and prince from the royal family that once ruled Iraq, to facilitate the process. "Already they have come to terms with participating in the next election, across the board, 100 percent."

Thorny demands

The list produced by the meeting includes demands that Sunni interests are provided for in Iraq's permanent constitution, which the national assembly is charged with writing this year.

But it also includes thornier demands such as recognition that Iraqis have a right to oppose US occupation, a schedule be developed for US forces to leave Iraq, reversal of US de-Baathification policy in the military, and the release of all detainees for whom there is no solid evidence they committed a crime. They also want a Sunni in a top job in the country's security apparatus, particularly the Ministry of Interior.

Shiites are taking note of the shift in Sunni willingness to participate and are taking the emerging group seriously as the first real representatives of the Sunnis.

"The most important thing is that they create a [leadership] for Sunnis," says Humam Hamoudi, a candidate from the United Iraqi Alliance (UIA), a group of Shiite religious leaders that won the majority of national assembly seats.

The UIA has struggled to find Sunnis willing to negotiate who also have clout in the Sunni community. But Mr. Hamoudi says those efforts were renewed after the top Shiite religious authority, Grand Ayatollah Ali al Sistani, instructed them to do so.

"He appealed to us to take more care of Sunnis' rights. He said, 'Sunnis are not only our brothers but they are yourselves,' so treat them accordingly," Hamoudi says.

If Sunnis don't participate, says Mr. Esposito, they will be further alienated by a government dominated by Shiites. Experience in other countries, he says, suggests this could lead to sectarian trouble.

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I will no longer post the text...just the url but I hope to post at least one account each day. This is the latest:

http://www.washtimes.com/op-ed/20050324-075950-3772r.htm

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This one is by Victor Davis Hanson and gives a more historical perspective.......

url deleted because it would't wrap around and only stretched the page out.

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Damn......why didn't this url wrap around insteand of stretching our??????help someone

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This is a very disturbing picture of the duplicity being waged by the King of Jordan:

Playing Both Sides in Jordan

By Jim Hoagland
Sunday, March 27, 2005; Page B07

Pop quiz: Which Arab ruler is to George W. Bush as Yasser Arafat was to Bill Clinton?

Congratulations if you said King Abdullah of Jordan. And a tip of the hat to all those Iraqis who came up with the answer so fast. You know your neighborhood, and your neighbor.
_
Abdullah emulates Arafat in possessing special, drop-in-anytime visiting rights to the White House and in merchandising that access to puff up his influence at home and with other Arab leaders. The Jordanian monarch seizes every opportunity to see and be seen with the U.S. president and his senior aides. Rather than attend an Arab summit to support his unconvincing, warmed-over version of a "peace plan" with Israel, Abdullah was again stateside last week, basking in the glow of meetings with Bush and Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice.

And, as Arafat did, Abdullah works against U.S. interests in Iraq and elsewhere while pretending otherwise. The youthful Jordanian autocrat pulls the wool over the eyes of a Republican president as the deceased Palestinian revolutionary did with Bush's Democratic predecessor.

If there is a difference in the comparative equation, it is likely that Clinton distrusted Arafat more. In Abdullah's case, Bush again displays a disturbing tendency to overinvest in the swagger and guile of people who run or who are close to spy agencies. (See Tenet, George, and Putin, Vladimir, for details.)

I stipulate the obvious: Bush is obliged by realpolitik to work with Abdullah and with Jordan. One of only two Arab states that have peace treaties with Israel, Jordan has long been an important link in the Middle East peace process as well as a platform for U.S. covert and military activities.

But a few senior U.S. officials, less impressed with Abdullah's Special Operations background and his deep connections to the CIA, fear that the president's lavish embrace is overdone. They point to the nasty public row between Iraq and Jordan over a suicide bombing and to the apparently protected presence in Jordan of key operatives in the Iraqi insurgency. These are troubling signs being ignored by Bush.

Iraqis have not forgotten that Jordan supported Saddam Hussein in the Persian Gulf War in 1990 and afterward. Iraqi resources were drained by the massive breaking of sanctions and other corrupt dealings that enriched the Jordanian establishment at the expense of the Iraqi people.

Abdullah's meddling in Iraqi affairs since the overthrow of the Baathists has rekindled those resentments. The king has exacerbated tensions with his aggressive championing of his co-religionists, Iraq's Sunni minority, who provided the base of past Baathist power and of the present insurgency.

Abdullah publicly warned against the coming to power of Iraq's Shiite majority as he sought to get Bush to postpone the Jan. 30 elections. He has portrayed Iraq on the edge of a religious war. He has channeled support to CIA favorites among Iraqi factions.

So when Iraqis heard on March 14 that the Jordanian family of Raed Banna had thrown a huge party to celebrate their relative's "martyrdom" -- which consisted of killing himself and 125 Iraqis in the Shiite town of Hilla -- they said "enough."

Angry crowds sacked the Jordanian Embassy in Baghdad and forced it to close. "Iraqis are feeling very bitter over what happened," Foreign Minister Hoshyar Zebari said. Shiite leader Abdul Aziz Hakim called on Jordan to acknowledge "the meanness and lowliness of people who celebrate the killing of honorable Iraqis" and "to stop the incitement, recruitment and mobilization of Jordanian terrorists to Iraq."

Hakim should not hold his breath. Former Baathist lieutenants who are now key operatives in the Iraqi insurgency still move themselves and money around Jordan without interference. In an incident that Bush should probe, U.S. officials a few months ago identified two such Iraqis and asked that they be questioned.

But the king waved the Americans off, saying that the two were minor figures who did not have blood on their hands. "We came to know that wasn't true, as he no doubt knew back then," one U.S. official told me.

Abdullah has publicly suggested that Syria should consider Bush's demand for a withdrawal from Lebanon while privately sharing with other Arab leaders his fears that such a move would be destabilizing. And he has been more supportive of the president's push for democracy in the Arab world in Washington meetings than he has been at home.

This does not win Abdullah the world-class laurels for duplicity and deception garnered by Arafat. But then the king is still young.

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Is Syria really going to comply?????

ll Syrian Forces to Leave Lebanon by April 30
Sun Apr 3, 2005 08:59 AM ET
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Reuters Television
Syria Promises April Pullout Play

By Inal Ersan

DAMASCUS (Reuters) - Syria has promised to withdraw all its forces from Lebanon by April 30 and will let a United Nations team verify the pullout, a U.N. envoy said Sunday.

Damascus ordered the withdrawal, demanded by a Security Council resolution seven months ago, after coming under intense international pressure over the Feb. 14 assassination of a Lebanese former prime minister, Rafik al-Hariri.

The U.N. envoy, Terje Roed-Larsen, said Syrian Foreign Minister Farouq al-Shara had told him that "all Syrian troops, military assets and the intelligence apparatus will have been withdrawn fully and completely latest by April 30, 2005."

Roed-Larsen was speaking at a joint news conference with Shara after talks with President Bashar al-Assad in Damascus.

"Syria has agreed that subject to the acceptance of the Lebanese authorities a U.N. verification team will be dispatched to verify the full Syrian military and intelligence withdrawal," the U.N. official said.

Syria first sent troops to Lebanon in 1976, early in its 1975-90 civil war, but in recent years had reduced their numbers to about 14,000 from a peak of 40,000.

U.N. Resolution 1559, sponsored by the United States and France, demanded the departure of all foreign forces, the disbanding of all Lebanese militias and respect for Lebanon's political independence.

"Syria by its full withdrawal from Lebanon would have implemented its part of resolution 1559," Shara said.

The declared timetable means all Syrian forces will have left before Lebanon holds parliamentary elections. The polls were due to have taken place in May, but might be pushed back because of political turmoil since Hariri's killing.

"POSITIVE IMPETUS"

Lebanese opposition leaders have accused Syria or the Lebanese security agencies that it backs of responsibility for Hariri's death. Damascus denies any involvement. Continued ...

© Reuters 2005. All Rights Reserved.

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Middle East history lesson for the day

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