WaPo: Mideast Makeover

the lebanese think you're delusional as well:

"It's strange for me to say it, but this process of change has started because of the American invasion of Iraq. I was cynical about Iraq. But when I saw the Iraqi people voting three weeks ago, 8 million of them, it was the start of a new Arab world. The Syrian people, the Egyptian people, all say that something is changing. The Berlin Wall has fallen. We can see it."
--Walid Jumblatt, Patriarch of the Druze Muslim community in Lebanon

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A45575-2005Feb22.html

 

wow, even the editors at the NYTimes are noticing!

http://www.nytimes.com/2005/03/01/o...=d5d81b07fecc9631&ei=5090&partner=rssuserland

--
March 1, 2005
EDITORIAL
Mideast Climate Change

It's not even spring yet, but a long-frozen political order seems to be cracking all over the Middle East. Cautious hopes for something new and better are stirring along the Tigris and the Nile, the elegant boulevards of Beirut, and the impoverished towns of the Gaza Strip. It is far too soon for any certainties about ultimate outcomes. In Iraq, a brutal insurgency still competes for headlines with post-election democratic maneuvering. Yesterday a suicide bomber plowed into a crowd of Iraqi police and Army recruits, killing at least 122 people - the largest death toll in a single such bombing since the American invasion nearly two years ago. And the Palestinian terrorists who blew up a Tel Aviv nightclub last Friday underscored the continuing fragility of what has now been almost two months of steady political and diplomatic progress between Israelis and Palestinians.

Still, this has so far been a year of heartening surprises - each one remarkable in itself, and taken together truly astonishing. The Bush administration is entitled to claim a healthy share of the credit for many of these advances. It boldly proclaimed the cause of Middle East democracy at a time when few in the West thought it had any realistic chance. And for all the negative consequences that flowed from the American invasion of Iraq, there could have been no democratic elections there this January if Saddam Hussein had still been in power. Washington's challenge now lies in finding ways to nurture and encourage these still fragile trends without smothering them in a triumphalist embrace.

Lebanon's political reawakening took a significant new turn yesterday when popular protests brought down the pro-Syrian government of Prime Minister Omar Karami. Syria's occupation of Lebanon, nearly three decades long, started tottering after the Feb. 14 assassination of the country's leading independent politician, the former prime minister Rafik Hariri.

If Damascus had a hand in this murder, as many Lebanese suspect, it had a boomerang effect on Lebanon's politics. Instead of intimidating critics of Syria's dominant role, it inflamed them. To stem the growing backlash over the Hariri murder, last week Syria announced its intentions to pull back its occupation forces to a region near the border - although without offering any firm timetable. Yesterday, with protests continuing, the pro-Syrian cabinet resigned. Washington, in an unusual alliance with France, continues to press for full compliance with the Security Council's demand for an early and complete Syrian withdrawal. That needs to happen promptly. Once Syria is gone, Hezbollah, which has engaged in international terrorism under Syrian protection, must either confine itself to peaceful political activity or be shut down.

Last weekend's surprise announcement of plans to hold at least nominally competitive presidential elections in Egypt could prove even more historic, although many of the specific details seem likely to be disappointing. Egypt is the Arab world's most populous country and one of its most politically influential. In more than five millenniums of recorded history, it has never seen a truly free and competitive election.

To be realistic, Egypt isn't likely to see one this year either. For all his talk of opening up the process, President Hosni Mubarak, 76, is likely to make sure that no threatening candidates emerge to deny him a fifth six-year term. But after seeing more than eight million Iraqis choose their leaders in January, Egypt's voters, and its increasingly courageous opposition movement, will no longer retreat into sullen hopelessness so readily. The Bush administration has helped foster that feeling of hope for a democratic future by keeping the pressure on Mr. Mubarak. But the real heroes are on-the-ground patriots like Ayman Nour, who founded a new party aptly named Tomorrow last October and is now in jail. If Mr. Mubarak truly wants more open politics, he should free Mr. Nour promptly.

It is similarly encouraging that the terrorists who attacked a Tel Aviv nightclub on Friday, killing five Israelis, have not yet managed to completely scuttle the new peace dynamic between Israel and the Palestinian Authority. Israel contends that those terrorists were sponsored by Syria, but its soldiers reported discovering an explosives-filled car in the West Bank yesterday. The good news is that the leaders on both sides did not instantly retreat to familiar corners in angry rejectionism. Prime Minister Ariel Sharon and the new Palestinian leader, Mahmoud Abbas, have proved they can work together to thwart terrorism and deny terrorists an instant veto over progress toward a negotiated peace.

Over the past two decades, as democracies replaced police states across Central and Eastern Europe and Latin America, and a new economic dynamism lifted hundreds of millions of eastern and southern Asia out of poverty and into the middle class, the Middle East stagnated in a perverse time warp that reduced its brightest people to hopelessness or barely contained rage. The wonder is less that a new political restlessness is finally visible, but that it took so long to break through the ice.

 

i imagine it's akin to what you feel for the hundreds of thousands who lost their lives to saddam and his saddamotic sadists during the 25 years of his (mis)rule.

 

i'm not trying to defend anyone's past actions. just saying that mentioning the thousands of innocents who may have died since the invasion w/o including the hundreds of thousands that did so under saddam represents an appalling, though perhaps intentional, lack of context.

 

do whut?

 

yes, the iraqis gave him the (purple) finger.

 

...and Assad is getting the message.

more cool pics too.

http://aolsvc.news.aol.com/news/article.adp?id=20050228090009990003

--
Syrian Leader Hints at Lebanon Pullout
Thousands of Lebanese Demand Autonomy in Wake of Assassination
By Nadim Ladki, Reuters

BEIRUT, Lebanon (March 1) - Syrian President Bashar al-Assad said he expected Syrian troops to pull out of Lebanon in a few months, as hundreds of Lebanese protesters returned to central Beirut on Tuesday demanding Syria quit their country.

Syria has 14,000 troops in Lebanon, but its dominant role in the country has come under increasing pressure as a result of mass demonstrations sparked by the assassination last month of former Lebanese Prime Minister Rafik al-Hariri.

Two weeks of unprecedented protests forced the pro-Syrian cabinet of Prime Minister Omar Karami to step down on Monday, piling pressure on Damascus, and left officials with a complicated search for a new premier.

''It (withdrawal) should be very soon and maybe in the next few months. Not after that,'' Assad told Time magazine in an interview published on its Web site on Tuesday. ''I can't give you a technical answer. The point is the next few months.''

Assad would not give a definite timetable for pulling out his army, saying it depended on technical, rather than political, considerations.

''I could not say we could do it in two months because I have not had the meeting with the army people. They may say it will take six months.''

Market fears of a political vacuum put the Lebanese pound under intense pressure, forcing the central bank to dip deeply into its foreign exchange reserves to defend the currency.

Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice welcomed what she called moves to restore democracy in Lebanon.

''Events in Lebanon are moving in a very important direction,'' she said in London. ''The Lebanese people are starting to express their aspirations for democracy ... This is something that we support very much.''

Rice and French Foreign Minister Michel Barnier repeated calls for Syria to withdraw its troops from Lebanon.

Washington and Paris, co-sponsors of Security Council resolution 1559 demanding an end to foreign interference in Lebanon, called for general elections planned for May to be free and fair and suggested international assistance.

''They must have the opportunity to chart their own course through free and fair parliamentary elections this spring, bolstered by an international observer presence prior to and during the elections,'' the countries said in a joint statement.

Thousands of demonstrators turned a square in Beirut into a sea of Lebanese flags on Monday night and exploded into riotous celebration when the government unexpectedly quit after a parliament debate on Hariri's killing.

'People Power' on Display


The jubilant protesters left in the early hours of Tuesday only for a few hundred to return hours later, vowing to keep up their street protests until Syrian troops left the country.

''Our hopes are growing regarding Syria's exit after the resignation of the government,'' Patrick Risha, a 22-year-old political science student told Reuters at Martyrs' Square. ''This encourages us to stay here and continue our protest.''

Most of the opposition protesters are Maronite Christians, who have long opposed Syria's role in Lebanon, Druze and some Sunni Muslims. Shi'ite Muslims, Lebanon's largest community, have mainly stayed away from the anti-Syrian rallies.

''The Lebanese popular will has triumphed ... but this is not enough,'' main opposition figure Druze leader Walid Jumblatt told Reuters Television at his mansion in the Chouf mountain.

''The next step is to have an interim government to supervise the elections and the results of the elections, which will determine the next government which will in turn execute the Taif agreement with the Syrian government,'' he said.

The Taif Accord that ended Lebanon's 1975-90 civil war called for a redeployment of Syrian troops to eastern Lebanon, followed by agreement on a timetable for a full withdrawal.

Newspapers hailed the role of the Lebanese in trying to bring change. ''People power brings down Karami's cabinet,'' the headline in Beirut's English-language Daily Star newspaper read.

The country's top two pro-Syrian officials, President Emile Lahoud and Parliament Speaker Nabih Berri, were in contact to discuss a new government, officials said. Lahoud was set to call for consultations this week with parliamentary deputies to choose a successor.