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He who cast the first stone probably didn’t

The following is an article I found last year in the International Herald Tribune, written by Daniel Gilbert. At the time (24 July 2006), the war between Israel and Lebanon/Hezbollah had only been going on for a week, and the discussion in the international community seemed to focus mainly on the 'disproportonality' of Israel's attack. As a psychologist, Gilbert has a couple of very interesting insights on how people react to each other, and his sources are interesting psychological researches into how people rationalize their own and other's actions and reactions. I am copying his text here in its full length, because I would like to share his insights with you and the article itself is well-written en worth the read:

Long before seat belts or common sense were particularly widespread, my family made annual trips to New York in our 1963 Valiant station wagon. Mom and Dad took the front seat, my infant sister sat in my mother's lap and my brother and I had what we called "the wayback" all to ourselves.

In the wayback, we'd lounge around doing puzzles, reading comics and counting license plates. Eventually we'd fight. When our fight had finally escalated to the point of tears, our mother would turn around to chastise us, and my brother and I would start to plead our cases.

"But he hit me first," one of us would say, to which the other would inevitably add, "But he hit me harder."

It turns out that my brother and I were not alone in believing that these two claims can get a puncher off the hook. In virtually every human society, "He hit me first" provides an acceptable rationale for doing that which is otherwise forbidden. Both civil and religious law provide long lists of behaviors that are illegal or immoral - unless they are responses in kind, in which case they are perfectly fine.

After all, it is wrong to punch anyone except a puncher, and our language even has special words - like "retaliation" and "retribution" and "revenge" - whose common prefix is meant to remind us that a punch thrown second is legally and morally different than a punch thrown first.

That's why participants in every one of the globe's intractable conflicts - from Ireland to the Middle East - offer the even-numberedness of their punches as grounds for exculpation.

The problem with the principle of even-numberedness is that people count differently. Every action has a cause and a consequence: Something that led to it and something that followed from it. But research shows that while people think of their own actions as the consequences of what came before, they think of other people's actions as the causes of what came later.

In a study conducted by William Swann and colleagues at the University of Texas, pairs of volunteers played the roles of world leaders who were trying to decide whether to initiate a nuclear strike. The first volunteer was asked to make an opening statement, the second volunteer was asked to respond, the first volunteer was asked to respond to the second, and so on. At the end of the conversation, the volunteers were shown several of the statements that had been made and were asked to recall what had been said just before and just after each of them.

The results revealed an intriguing asymmetry: When volunteers were shown one of their own statements, they naturally remembered what had led them to say it. But when they were shown one of their conversation partner's statements, they naturally remembered how they had responded to it. In other words, volunteers remembered the causes of their own statements and the consequences of their partner's statements.

What seems like a grossly self- serving pattern of remembering is actually the product of two innocent facts. First, because our senses point outward, we can observe other people's actions but not our own.

Second, because mental life is a private affair, we can observe our own thoughts but not the thoughts of others. Together, these facts suggest that our reasons for punching will always be more salient to us than the punches themselves - but that the opposite will be true of other people's reasons and other people's punches.

Examples aren't hard to come by. Shiites seek revenge on Sunnis for the revenge they sought on Shiites; Irish Catholics retaliate against the Protestants who retaliated against them; and since 1948, it's hard to think of any partisan in the Middle East who has done anything but play defense. In each of these instances, people on one side claim that they are merely responding to provocation and dismiss the other side's identical claim as disingenuous spin. But research suggests that these claims reflect genuinely different perceptions of the same bloody conversation.

If the first principle of legitimate punching is that punches must be even-numbered, the second principle is that an even-numbered punch may be no more forceful than the odd- numbered punch that preceded it.

Legitimate retribution is meant to restore balance, and thus an eye for an eye is fair, but an eye for an eyelash is not. When the European Union condemned Israel for bombing Lebanon in retaliation for the kidnapping of two Israeli soldiers, it did not question Israel's right to respond, but rather, its "disproportionate use of force." It is O.K. to hit back, just not too hard.

Research shows that people have as much trouble applying the second principle as the first. In a study conducted by Sukhwinder Shergill and colleagues at University College London, pairs of volunteers were hooked up to a mechanical device that allowed each of them to exert pressure on the other volunteer's fingers.

The researcher began the game by exerting a fixed amount of pressure on the first volunteer's finger. The first volunteer was then asked to exert precisely the same amount of pressure on the second volunteer's finger. The second volunteer was then asked to exert the same amount of pressure on the first volunteer's finger. And so on.

The two volunteers took turns applying equal amounts of pressure to each other's fingers while the researchers measured the actual amount of pressure they applied.

The results were striking. Although volunteers tried to respond to each other's touches with equal force, they typically responded with about 40 percent more force than they had just experienced. Each time a volunteer was touched, he touched back harder, which led the other volunteer to touch back even harder. What began as a game of soft touches quickly became a game of moderate pokes and then hard prods, even though both volunteers were doing their level best to respond in kind.

Each volunteer was convinced that he was responding with equal force and that for some reason the other volunteer was escalating.

Neither realized that the escalation was the natural byproduct of a neurological quirk that causes the pain we receive to seem more painful than the pain we produce, so we usually give more pain than we have received.

Research teaches us that our reasons and our pains are more palpable, more obvious and real, than are the reasons and pains of others. This leads to the escalation of mutual harm, to the illusion that others are solely responsible for it and to the belief that our actions are justifiable responses to theirs.

None of this is to deny the roles that hatred, intolerance, avarice and deceit play in human conflict. It is simply to say that basic principles of human psychology are important ingredients in this miserable stew. Until we learn to stop trusting everything our brains tell us about others - and to start trusting others themselves - there will continue to be tears and recriminations in the wayback.

Daniel Gilbert, a professor of psychology at Harvard, is the author of "Stumbling on Happiness."

Bloody Hot Summer: hoe is de situatie nu in Libanon?

Het is een lang verhaal, maar Mohamad Bazzi geeft in dit stuk een uitgebreide en heldere uitleg van de situatie hier (en waar het heen zou kunnen gaan). Afkomstig uit The Nation. The car bomb that shook Beirut's waterfront on the evening of June 13 was the sixth explosion in Lebanon in less than a month. But unlike the other bombings, which were intended more to instill fear than to cause serious damage, this one had a political target: Walid Eido, a member of the US-backed parliamentary majority. With the killing of one more legislator--the fifth in two years--Lebanon is hurtling toward yet another crisis.

The bomb, which was planted in a parked car, ripped through Eido's black Mercedes as his motorcade left a swimming club where he played cards with friends almost every afternoon. The explosion resonated throughout Beirut, shattering windows 100 yards away and throwing body parts onto a nearby soccer field. It killed Eido, his son and eight other people. Within minutes, ambulances filled the Corniche, a palm-tree-lined boulevard that overlooks the Mediterranean and is often packed with people out for an evening stroll.

As soon as the bomb went off, dozens of young men rushed to the scene, and soldiers had to push them back from the burning cars. They gathered around two fire trucks, picking through twisted wreckage. Naim Chebbo, a 33-year-old waiter, ran for a half-mile from his restaurant, following the cloud of black smoke. Drenched in sweat and hyperventilating, he screamed, "Look at what the Syrians are doing to us! Don't ask me why this bombing happened. Ask the Syrians!" He pointed up a hill, toward the headquarters of the Syrian Social Nationalist Party. "I'm going to get the SSNP. I'm going to fuck them up!" he shrieked. "They're just sitting up there laughing." His friends restrained him from marching up the hill.

When Chebbo began insulting Sayyid Hassan Nasrallah--leader of Hezbollah, the Shiite political party and militia allied with Syria--calling him a "terrorist" and a "criminal," a bystander told Chebbo to keep quiet. The two began shoving each other, and a dozen soldiers toting M-16s moved between them, at one point cocking their guns to shoot into the air. Soldiers finally managed to wrestle Chebbo away, and he walked off, still cursing.

This is the state of Lebanon today: deep sectarian anger that could boil over at any moment. In mixed Beirut neighborhoods, tensions rise between Sunnis and Shiites after each bombing. Tempers flare, small fights get out of hand, people start calling their friends and relatives to come in from other areas to help them and eventually the police have to step in. (A Shiite friend who lives in a mainly Sunni neighborhood told me that for several days after Eido's killing, he found a broken egg each morning on his car.) And there's no shortage of bombings to stoke tensions: On June 24 a car bomb exploded near a convoy of United Nations peacekeepers in southern Lebanon, killing six troops under Spanish command. It was the first attack on the UN force since it was expanded to 13,000 soldiers after last summer's war between Israel and Hezbollah. Some Lebanese politicians quickly blamed Syria for the bombing, but there is also evidence that Sunni militants tied to Al Qaeda have been plotting for months to attack UN peacekeepers in the south.

Throughout Lebanon's fifteen-year civil war, foreign powers battled for control of the tiny country, either directly or through proxies. But a great deal of the day-to-day fighting involved well-armed rival neighborhood gangs. In a city on edge, angry young men like Chebbo can easily get out of control. Perhaps at the next bombing, they won't be held back.

"The elements for a new civil war are here. They are ready. But there are some red lines that prevent it from happening. We saw an example in January, when sectarian violence broke out but the national leaders quickly asked everyone to calm down," says Elias Hanna, a retired Lebanese army general who is now an independent military analyst. "You need an incident or catalyst that can ignite the situation. It's not yet here. But people's hearts are full of hatred."

'Everything Is Blowing Up'

Lebanon's current round of assassinations began in February 2005, when a powerful truck bomb killed former Prime Minister Rafik Hariri as his motorcade drove along the Corniche. Hariri's murder cast a harsh light on Syria's domination over its smaller neighbor. Faced with international pressure and mass protests, the Syrian-backed prime minister resigned, and Damascus pulled thousands of troops out of Lebanon. But the killings continued, mainly targeting politicians from the anti-Syrian bloc led by Rafik's son Saad Hariri.

Today Lebanon is bracing for a showdown over the presidency. It could be a bloody summer, as the presidential election looms in late September. The president is appointed by a majority vote in Parliament. After the last parliamentary election, in June 2005, Hariri's Future Movement and its allies won seventy-two seats in the 128-member legislature. But with several defections, Eido's killing and that of another legislator last November whose seat remains unfilled, the parliamentary majority is down to sixty-eight. If the majority loses another four members--either by death or defection--it will no longer be able to determine the next president. "Eido was assassinated to reduce the parliamentary majority in order to bring the government down," Samir Geagea, leader of the Lebanese Forces, a right-wing Christian group that is part of the ruling coalition, said after the bombing. "It seems that we're the opposition because we're the ones being targeted by assassinations."

There's another danger: Without a majority, it's conceivable that Prime Minister Fouad Siniora's government could fall in a parliamentary no-confidence vote. Siniora's twenty-four-member Cabinet has been in danger of collapsing since November, when six ministers representing Hezbollah and its allies resigned after talks to form a national unity government failed. (Siniora's ruling coalition of Sunni, Christian and Druse parties accuses Hezbollah of walking out of the government to block a UN investigation into Hariri's murder, which has been widely blamed on Syria.)

Hariri was Lebanon's most prominent Sunni leader, and his killing changed the dynamic within the Sunni community. During Lebanon's 1975-90 civil war, Sunnis and Shiites were largely allied under the banner of pan-Arabism and support for the Palestinian cause. But the current conflict has fractured them, with most Shiites supporting Hezbollah and most Sunnis backing the younger Hariri. Christians are divided between the two factions. Hezbollah is currently allied with Michel Aoun, a former army commander and prominent Maronite Christian politician.

Syria is likely the biggest beneficiary of these political killings. But the coming showdown over the presidency could prove catastrophic for all sides. And there doesn't appear to be any way out. All of Lebanon's crises have become intertwined--and they're all converging on the battle over the presidency. Ironically, the latest series of crises began in September 2004, when the Syrian regime forced the Lebanese Parliament to extend the presidential term of Emile Lahoud, a former army commander and Syrian ally, for three years.

Lebanon's problems are rooted in a sixty-four-year-old power-sharing agreement among the country's rival religious groups. The system was designed to keep a balance among eighteen sects, dictating that power must be shared between a Maronite president, a Sunni prime minister and a Shiite speaker of Parliament. But this confessional system has barely changed since it was put in place in the early 1940s, when Lebanon won its independence from French colonial rule. After decades of intermittent crises precipitated by the unworkable confessional balancing act, the structure again risks creating a failed state.

The Lebanese predicament is also an extension of the ongoing proxy war in Iraq--pitting Iran and Syria (which support Hezbollah) against the United States, Saudi Arabia and other Sunni Arab regimes (which support Hariri's alliance). As soon as Siniora's government took office, the Bush Administration began pressuring it to disarm Hezbollah.

The crises are interconnected in a Gordian knot: the Hezbollah-led Shiite walkout from Siniora's Cabinet, which throws the government's legitimacy into question because the Lebanese Constitution dictates that every major sect must be represented in the Cabinet; the creation of a new government; the pressure on Hezbollah to give up its weapons; and the disarming of various factions in twelve Palestinian refugee camps scattered across Lebanon. The issue of Palestinian weapons boiled over in late May, when a group of Sunni militants attacked the Lebanese Army, which then besieged the Nahr El-Bared camp near the northern city of Tripoli.

Siniora's government claims that Syrian intelligence created the militant group Fatah Al Islam and is using it to destabilize Lebanon. But as with the attempt to hold Syria responsible for the bombing against UN peacekeepers, the ruling coalition has provided little evidence to back up its claims about Fatah Al Islam. Some reports in the Lebanese press tied the group's leaders to Al Qaeda and to militant networks that are recruiting young Sunni men from northern Lebanon to fight in Iraq. It's unclear if Fatah Al Islam played a role in the attack on UN troops in the south, but the group is part of a growing militant Sunni movement in Lebanon, which is drawing inspiration--if not logistical help--from Al Qaeda. (In several messages over the past year, Al Qaeda's second-in-command, Ayman al-Zawahiri, urged Muslims to open a new front on Israel's border with Lebanon and to attack "Crusader forces" in the south--meaning UN troops.)

"All the problems that were suppressed for thirty years are popping up, and they're all popping up at the same time," says a Lebanese NGO worker who could not be quoted by name. "The Hezbollah weapons, the Palestinian weapons, the presidency; I mean everything, everything is now blowing up. It's thirty years of bullshit. The Pandora's box has opened up."

'The Blood of Sunnis Is Boiling'

When Hezbollah and its allies began an open-ended protest in downtown Beirut on December 1, setting up hundreds of tents outside the main government palace, relations between Sunnis and Shiites deteriorated quickly. On January 23 the opposition organized a nationwide strike as part of its campaign to topple Siniora's government. Two days later, rioting erupted around a university, killing four people, injuring dozens and forcing the army to impose a curfew in Beirut for the first time in ten years. Lebanon teetered on the edge of another civil war.

In the following months, sectarian tensions eased slightly--until Eido's assassination, which further inflamed the hatred between Sunnis and Shiites. The funeral procession on June 14 for Eido and his son passed through the Sunni neighborhood of Tarik Al-Jadideh, the scene of January's bloody street battles. Overnight, billboards throughout Beirut were plastered with pictures of the two men, calling them "the martyrs of justice." Hundreds of supporters carried the blue flags of the Future Movement and white flags with a stencil of a roaring tiger--the logo of the Ras Beirut Tigers, the movement's pseudo-militia, which has become more active in Sunni neighborhoods in recent months. At this point, the Tigers lack an organized military structure and weapons; instead, they're focused on showing their strength at rallies and on the streets of Muslim-dominated West Beirut.

"The blood of Sunnis is boiling!" a crowd of young men shouted as they marched behind the coffins. "Terrorist, terrorist, Hezbollah is a terrorist group!" Koranic verses warbled from the minarets of every mosque along the route, mixing with the loudspeakers mounted atop minibuses that blared out, "Today is the funeral for a new martyr killed at the hands of Bashar Assad"--the Syrian president. Other mourners insulted Hezbollah's revered leader, chanting, "Nasrallah is the enemy of God!"

After Saad Hariri spoke at the funeral, his supporters pumped their fists in the air and bellowed, "Labayk ya Saad-Eddine!" (We obey you, oh Saad-Eddine). It's the same rhythmic chant--freighted with religious overtones--that Nasrallah's followers intone whenever he speaks in public.

At Eido's funeral, the next Lebanese political crisis began to emerge. Within hours of his assassination, members of the Future Movement started calling for a special election to replace Eido, and another to fill the seat of Pierre Gemayel, a Maronite member of Parliament and minister allied with the Hariri bloc who was assassinated last November. Two days after Eido was buried, Siniora's Cabinet approved a plan to hold elections on August 5. But special elections also need the president's consent, and Lahoud has vowed not to sign any directive issued by Siniora's government because he "and half of the Lebanese people" consider it unconstitutional.

Even if the elections are held, it's unclear if the two new legislators would be allowed to take their seats in Parliament. Speaker Nabih Berri, leader of the Shiite Amal Party and a Hezbollah ally, has refused to convene Parliament ever since the Shiite ministers resigned in November. For months, Berri blocked the legislature from approving a UN Security Council plan to establish an international tribunal that will try Hariri's killers. In late May the council created the tribunal anyway--without Lebanese approval. (With the vote for president looming, the Future Movement and its allies have threatened to convene a parliamentary session without Berri; opposition legislators would likely boycott such a meeting.)

On June 17 Lahoud met with the octogenarian Maronite Patriarch Butros Nasrallah Sfeir, the most powerful Christian leader in Lebanon. Lahoud told the cleric that he's not being obstinate for his own sake but rather is trying to protect the powers of the presidency. Lahoud's argument is meant to appeal to the Patriarch and to Lebanese Maronites in general, who are worried about the waning power of the presidency--the last vestige of Christian influence. "Siniora and his government are trying to usurp the authority of the president, and that is a dangerous precedent that I cannot allow," Lahoud told Sfeir, according to the Lebanese daily Al-Akhbar. "These powers do not belong to me personally. They belong to the presidency."

Impasse

In the short term, Siniora's government began losing Shiite support after Washington backed Israel during its war last summer against Hezbollah. Fresh off its perceived military victory against a far superior Israeli Army, Hezbollah accused Siniora's government of being a US puppet and demanded more power. After months of on-and-off negotiations, Hezbollah and the Siniora-Hariri bloc now stand at an impasse.

But even if the two sides reach a compromise, another political crisis is sure to emerge, unless they address the root causes of Lebanon's instability--like the fact that the country's largest sect, Shiites, do not have power equal to their proportion of the population. Eventually, the Lebanese will have to tackle the question of what kind of country they want.

That question has dominated Lebanon since it gained independence in 1943. When the French left, they created the confessional system and handed the lion's share of political power to the Francophone Maronite elite. The system was enshrined under the National Pact, an unwritten agreement among Lebanese leaders. Seats in Parliament were divided on a 6-to-5 ratio of Christians to Muslims, with parliamentary seats and executive offices divided among the major sects, and that partitioning was extended to most government jobs.

The division was based on a 1932 census, which showed Maronites as the majority in Lebanon. Since then, the government has refused to hold a new census. By the 1960s, when Muslims began to outnumber Christians, Muslims began to clamor for a change in the balance of power. A recent State Department report estimated that Lebanon's population of 4 million is more than two-thirds Sunni and Shiite. Some Lebanese researchers estimate that Shiites make up 40 percent of the population, although others put the number slightly lower.

When civil war broke out in 1975, the political imbalance was one of the driving forces that prompted each sect to form its own militia. Because of the confessional system, Lebanese political institutions never got a chance to develop; the country remained dependent on the powerful clans and feudal landlords that held sway in much of Lebanon. The zaeem, or confessional leader who usually inherited rule from his father, became paramount during the war. With most people loyal to their sectarian leaders, few Lebanese were invested in developing the constitutional institutions of the state.

As the war waned in 1989, Lebanon's political class convened in the Saudi city of Taif to salvage the sectarian system. Brokered by Saudi Arabia and Syria, the resulting Taif Accord restructured the National Pact by taking some power away from the Maronites. Parliament was expanded to 128 members, divided equally between Christians and Muslims. Taif also called for all militias to disarm--except for Hezbollah, whose military branch was labeled a "national resistance" against the Israeli occupation of southern Lebanon, which ended in 2000. All factions in Lebanon constantly affirm that they will abide by Taif, elevating the document to the status of a Magna Carta. Yet few acknowledge that the agreement also called for eventually abolishing the sectarian system, although it gave no time frame for doing so.

Confessionalism leads to a weak state. It encourages horse-trading and alliances with powerful patrons. And it's easily exploited by outside powers (Syria, Iran, the United States and Saudi Arabia being the latest examples). But most of the current players are too invested in this system to really change it. And foreign patrons don't want change, because that could reduce their influence.

"Whenever you talk about a new Taif, people freak out.... Lebanese are always afraid of changing any social contract," says Khalil Gebara, co-director of the Lebanese Transparency Association, an anticorruption watchdog group. "Because the problem is that, in Lebanon, social contracts are changed only in times of violence."

What if the battle over the presidency continues past September, and the country is further paralyzed? There's a real fear that the Lebanese government could once again split into two dueling administrations, as happened in 1988, when outgoing President Amin Gemayel appointed Aoun as a caretaker prime minister because Parliament could not agree on a new president. He created a largely Christian government, while the sitting Sunni prime minister refused to leave and led a rival Muslim administration. The crisis ended in October 1990, when Syrian warplanes bombed the presidential palace, driving Aoun into exile in France. It's remarkable how many Lebanese are talking openly today about the possibility of another government breakup; some are even resigned to it.

Splitting the country into two administrations in 1988 was a logical endpoint of the confessional system. Lebanese leaders are going down the same path once again: They're trying to run the country under a system that's no longer viable and that continues to create a perpetual crisis. Until the Lebanese can agree on a stronger and more egalitarian way to share authority, they will be cursed with instability, their future dictated by foreign powers.

The Redirection

Efforts to curb Iran’s influence have involved the United States in worsening Sunni-Shiite tensions Is the Administration’s new policy benefitting our enemies in the war on terrorism?

by Seymour M. Hersh; March 5, 2007 in The New Yorker

Efforts to curb Iran’s influence have involved the United States in worsening Sunni-Shiite tensions.

A STRATEGIC SHIFT

In the past few months, as the situation in Iraq has deteriorated, the Bush Administration, in both its public diplomacy and its covert operations, has significantly shifted its Middle East strategy. The “redirection,” as some inside the White House have called the new strategy, has brought the United States closer to an open confrontation with Iran and, in parts of the region, propelled it into a widening sectarian conflict between Shiite and Sunni Muslims.

To undermine Iran, which is predominantly Shiite, the Bush Administration has decided, in effect, to reconfigure its priorities in the Middle East. In Lebanon, the Administration has coöperated with Saudi Arabia’s government, which is Sunni, in clandestine operations that are intended to weaken Hezbollah, the Shiite organization that is backed by Iran. The U.S. has also taken part in clandestine operations aimed at Iran and its ally Syria. A by-product of these activities has been the bolstering of Sunni extremist groups that espouse a militant vision of Islam and are hostile to America and sympathetic to Al Qaeda.

One contradictory aspect of the new strategy is that, in Iraq, most of the insurgent violence directed at the American military has come from Sunni forces, and not from Shiites. But, from the Administration’s perspective, the most profound—and unintended—strategic consequence of the Iraq war is the empowerment of Iran. Its President, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, has made defiant pronouncements about the destruction of Israel and his country’s right to pursue its nuclear program, and last week its supreme religious leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, said on state television that “realities in the region show that the arrogant front, headed by the U.S. and its allies, will be the principal loser in the region.”

After the revolution of 1979 brought a religious government to power, the United States broke with Iran and cultivated closer relations with the leaders of Sunni Arab states such as Jordan, Egypt, and Saudi Arabia. That calculation became more complex after the September 11th attacks, especially with regard to the Saudis. Al Qaeda is Sunni, and many of its operatives came from extremist religious circles inside Saudi Arabia. Before the invasion of Iraq, in 2003, Administration officials, influenced by neoconservative ideologues, assumed that a Shiite government there could provide a pro-American balance to Sunni extremists, since Iraq’s Shiite majority had been oppressed under Saddam Hussein. They ignored warnings from the intelligence community about the ties between Iraqi Shiite leaders and Iran, where some had lived in exile for years. Now, to the distress of the White House, Iran has forged a close relationship with the Shiite-dominated government of Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki.

The new American policy, in its broad outlines, has been discussed publicly. In testimony before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee in January, Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice said that there is “a new strategic alignment in the Middle East,” separating “reformers” and “extremists”; she pointed to the Sunni states as centers of moderation, and said that Iran, Syria, and Hezbollah were “on the other side of that divide.” (Syria’s Sunni majority is dominated by the Alawi sect.) Iran and Syria, she said, “have made their choice and their choice is to destabilize.”

Some of the core tactics of the redirection are not public, however. The clandestine operations have been kept secret, in some cases, by leaving the execution or the funding to the Saudis, or by finding other ways to work around the normal congressional appropriations process, current and former officials close to the Administration said.

A senior member of the House Appropriations Committee told me that he had heard about the new strategy, but felt that he and his colleagues had not been adequately briefed. “We haven’t got any of this,” he said. “We ask for anything going on, and they say there’s nothing. And when we ask specific questions they say, ‘We’re going to get back to you.’ It’s so frustrating.”

The key players behind the redirection are Vice-President Dick Cheney, the deputy national-security adviser Elliott Abrams, the departing Ambassador to Iraq (and nominee for United Nations Ambassador), Zalmay Khalilzad, and Prince Bandar bin Sultan, the Saudi national-security adviser. While Rice has been deeply involved in shaping the public policy, former and current officials said that the clandestine side has been guided by Cheney. (Cheney’s office and the White House declined to comment for this story; the Pentagon did not respond to specific queries but said, “The United States is not planning to go to war with Iran.”)

The policy shift has brought Saudi Arabia and Israel into a new strategic embrace, largely because both countries see Iran as an existential threat. They have been involved in direct talks, and the Saudis, who believe that greater stability in Israel and Palestine will give Iran less leverage in the region, have become more involved in Arab-Israeli negotiations. The new strategy “is a major shift in American policy—it’s a sea change,” a U.S. government consultant with close ties to Israel said. The Sunni states “were petrified of a Shiite resurgence, and there was growing resentment with our gambling on the moderate Shiites in Iraq,” he said. “We cannot reverse the Shiite gain in Iraq, but we can contain it.”

“It seems there has been a debate inside the government over what’s the biggest danger—Iran or Sunni radicals,” Vali Nasr, a senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations, who has written widely on Shiites, Iran, and Iraq, told me. “The Saudis and some in the Administration have been arguing that the biggest threat is Iran and the Sunni radicals are the lesser enemies. This is a victory for the Saudi line.”

Martin Indyk, a senior State Department official in the Clinton Administration who also served as Ambassador to Israel, said that “the Middle East is heading into a serious Sunni-Shiite Cold War.” Indyk, who is the director of the Saban Center for Middle East Policy at the Brookings Institution, added that, in his opinion, it was not clear whether the White House was fully aware of the strategic implications of its new policy. “The White House is not just doubling the bet in Iraq,” he said. “It’s doubling the bet across the region. This could get very complicated. Everything is upside down.”

The Administration’s new policy for containing Iran seems to complicate its strategy for winning the war in Iraq. Patrick Clawson, an expert on Iran and the deputy director for research at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy, argued, however, that closer ties between the United States and moderate or even radical Sunnis could put “fear” into the government of Prime Minister Maliki and “make him worry that the Sunnis could actually win” the civil war there. Clawson said that this might give Maliki an incentive to coöperate with the United States in suppressing radical Shiite militias, such as Moqtada al-Sadr’s Mahdi Army.

Even so, for the moment, the U.S. remains dependent on the coöperation of Iraqi Shiite leaders. The Mahdi Army may be openly hostile to American interests, but other Shiite militias are counted as U.S. allies. Both Moqtada al-Sadr and the White House back Maliki. A memorandum written late last year by Stephen Hadley, the national-security adviser, suggested that the Administration try to separate Maliki from his more radical Shiite allies by building his base among moderate Sunnis and Kurds, but so far the trends have been in the opposite direction. As the Iraqi Army continues to founder in its confrontations with insurgents, the power of the Shiite militias has steadily increased.

Flynt Leverett, a former Bush Administration National Security Council official, told me that “there is nothing coincidental or ironic” about the new strategy with regard to Iraq. “The Administration is trying to make a case that Iran is more dangerous and more provocative than the Sunni insurgents to American interests in Iraq, when—if you look at the actual casualty numbers—the punishment inflicted on America by the Sunnis is greater by an order of magnitude,” Leverett said. “This is all part of the campaign of provocative steps to increase the pressure on Iran. The idea is that at some point the Iranians will respond and then the Administration will have an open door to strike at them.”

President George W. Bush, in a speech on January 10th, partially spelled out this approach. “These two regimes”—Iran and Syria—“are allowing terrorists and insurgents to use their territory to move in and out of Iraq,” Bush said. “Iran is providing material support for attacks on American troops. We will disrupt the attacks on our forces. We’ll interrupt the flow of support from Iran and Syria. And we will seek out and destroy the networks providing advanced weaponry and training to our enemies in Iraq.”

In the following weeks, there was a wave of allegations from the Administration about Iranian involvement in the Iraq war. On February 11th, reporters were shown sophisticated explosive devices, captured in Iraq, that the Administration claimed had come from Iran. The Administration’s message was, in essence, that the bleak situation in Iraq was the result not of its own failures of planning and execution but of Iran’s interference.

The U.S. military also has arrested and interrogated hundreds of Iranians in Iraq. “The word went out last August for the military to snatch as many Iranians in Iraq as they can,” a former senior intelligence official said. “They had five hundred locked up at one time. We’re working these guys and getting information from them. The White House goal is to build a case that the Iranians have been fomenting the insurgency and they’ve been doing it all along—that Iran is, in fact, supporting the killing of Americans.” The Pentagon consultant confirmed that hundreds of Iranians have been captured by American forces in recent months. But he told me that that total includes many Iranian humanitarian and aid workers who “get scooped up and released in a short time,” after they have been interrogated.

“We are not planning for a war with Iran,” Robert Gates, the new Defense Secretary, announced on February 2nd, and yet the atmosphere of confrontation has deepened. According to current and former American intelligence and military officials, secret operations in Lebanon have been accompanied by clandestine operations targeting Iran. American military and special-operations teams have escalated their activities in Iran to gather intelligence and, according to a Pentagon consultant on terrorism and the former senior intelligence official, have also crossed the border in pursuit of Iranian operatives from Iraq.

At Rice’s Senate appearance in January, Democratic Senator Joseph Biden, of Delaware, pointedly asked her whether the U.S. planned to cross the Iranian or the Syrian border in the course of a pursuit. “Obviously, the President isn’t going to rule anything out to protect our troops, but the plan is to take down these networks in Iraq,” Rice said, adding, “I do think that everyone will understand that—the American people and I assume the Congress expect the President to do what is necessary to protect our forces.”

The ambiguity of Rice’s reply prompted a response from Nebraska Senator Chuck Hagel, a Republican, who has been critical of the Administration: "Some of us remember 1970, Madam Secretary. And that was Cambodia. And when our government lied to the American people and said, “We didn’t cross the border going into Cambodia,” in fact we did. I happen to know something about that, as do some on this committee. So, Madam Secretary, when you set in motion the kind of policy that the President is talking about here, it’s very, very dangerous."

The Administration’s concern about Iran’s role in Iraq is coupled with its long-standing alarm over Iran’s nuclear program. On Fox News on January 14th, Cheney warned of the possibility, in a few years, “of a nuclear-armed Iran, astride the world’s supply of oil, able to affect adversely the global economy, prepared to use terrorist organizations and/or their nuclear weapons to threaten their neighbors and others around the world.” He also said, “If you go and talk with the Gulf states or if you talk with the Saudis or if you talk with the Israelis or the Jordanians, the entire region is worried… . The threat Iran represents is growing.”

The Administration is now examining a wave of new intelligence on Iran’s weapons programs. Current and former American officials told me that the intelligence, which came from Israeli agents operating in Iran, includes a claim that Iran has developed a three-stage solid-fuelled intercontinental missile capable of delivering several small warheads—each with limited accuracy—inside Europe. The validity of this human intelligence is still being debated. A similar argument about an imminent threat posed by weapons of mass destruction—and questions about the intelligence used to make that case—formed the prelude to the invasion of Iraq. Many in Congress have greeted the claims about Iran with wariness; in the Senate on February 14th, Hillary Clinton said, “We have all learned lessons from the conflict in Iraq, and we have to apply those lessons to any allegations that are being raised about Iran. Because, Mr. President, what we are hearing has too familiar a ring and we must be on guard that we never again make decisions on the basis of intelligence that turns out to be faulty.”

Still, the Pentagon is continuing intensive planning for a possible bombing attack on Iran, a process that began last year, at the direction of the President. In recent months, the former intelligence official told me, a special planning group has been established in the offices of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, charged with creating a contingency bombing plan for Iran that can be implemented, upon orders from the President, within twenty-four hours.

In the past month, I was told by an Air Force adviser on targeting and the Pentagon consultant on terrorism, the Iran planning group has been handed a new assignment: to identify targets in Iran that may be involved in supplying or aiding militants in Iraq. Previously, the focus had been on the destruction of Iran’s nuclear facilities and possible regime change.

Two carrier strike groups—the Eisenhower and the Stennis—are now in the Arabian Sea. One plan is for them to be relieved early in the spring, but there is worry within the military that they may be ordered to stay in the area after the new carriers arrive, according to several sources. (Among other concerns, war games have shown that the carriers could be vulnerable to swarming tactics involving large numbers of small boats, a technique that the Iranians have practiced in the past; carriers have limited maneuverability in the narrow Strait of Hormuz, off Iran’s southern coast.) The former senior intelligence official said that the current contingency plans allow for an attack order this spring. He added, however, that senior officers on the Joint Chiefs were counting on the White House’s not being “foolish enough to do this in the face of Iraq, and the problems it would give the Republicans in 2008.”

PRINCE BANDAR’S GAME

The Administration’s effort to diminish Iranian authority in the Middle East has relied heavily on Saudi Arabia and on Prince Bandar, the Saudi national-security adviser. Bandar served as the Ambassador to the United States for twenty-two years, until 2005, and has maintained a friendship with President Bush and Vice-President Cheney. In his new post, he continues to meet privately with them. Senior White House officials have made several visits to Saudi Arabia recently, some of them not disclosed.

Last November, Cheney flew to Saudi Arabia for a surprise meeting with King Abdullah and Bandar. The Times reported that the King warned Cheney that Saudi Arabia would back its fellow-Sunnis in Iraq if the United States were to withdraw. A European intelligence official told me that the meeting also focussed on more general Saudi fears about “the rise of the Shiites.” In response, “The Saudis are starting to use their leverage—money.”

In a royal family rife with competition, Bandar has, over the years, built a power base that relies largely on his close relationship with the U.S., which is crucial to the Saudis. Bandar was succeeded as Ambassador by Prince Turki al-Faisal; Turki resigned after eighteen months and was replaced by Adel A. al-Jubeir, a bureaucrat who has worked with Bandar. A former Saudi diplomat told me that during Turki’s tenure he became aware of private meetings involving Bandar and senior White House officials, including Cheney and Abrams. “I assume Turki was not happy with that,” the Saudi said. But, he added, “I don’t think that Bandar is going off on his own.” Although Turki dislikes Bandar, the Saudi said, he shared his goal of challenging the spread of Shiite power in the Middle East.

The split between Shiites and Sunnis goes back to a bitter divide, in the seventh century, over who should succeed the Prophet Muhammad. Sunnis dominated the medieval caliphate and the Ottoman Empire, and Shiites, traditionally, have been regarded more as outsiders. Worldwide, ninety per cent of Muslims are Sunni, but Shiites are a majority in Iran, Iraq, and Bahrain, and are the largest Muslim group in Lebanon. Their concentration in a volatile, oil-rich region has led to concern in the West and among Sunnis about the emergence of a “Shiite crescent”—especially given Iran’s increased geopolitical weight.

“The Saudis still see the world through the days of the Ottoman Empire, when Sunni Muslims ruled the roost and the Shiites were the lowest class,” Frederic Hof, a retired military officer who is an expert on the Middle East, told me. If Bandar was seen as bringing about a shift in U.S. policy in favor of the Sunnis, he added, it would greatly enhance his standing within the royal family.

The Saudis are driven by their fear that Iran could tilt the balance of power not only in the region but within their own country. Saudi Arabia has a significant Shiite minority in its Eastern Province, a region of major oil fields; sectarian tensions are high in the province. The royal family believes that Iranian operatives, working with local Shiites, have been behind many terrorist attacks inside the kingdom, according to Vali Nasr. “Today, the only army capable of containing Iran”—the Iraqi Army—“has been destroyed by the United States. You’re now dealing with an Iran that could be nuclear-capable and has a standing army of four hundred and fifty thousand soldiers.” (Saudi Arabia has seventy-five thousand troops in its standing army.)

Nasr went on, “The Saudis have considerable financial means, and have deep relations with the Muslim Brotherhood and the Salafis”—Sunni extremists who view Shiites as apostates. “The last time Iran was a threat, the Saudis were able to mobilize the worst kinds of Islamic radicals. Once you get them out of the box, you can’t put them back.”

The Saudi royal family has been, by turns, both a sponsor and a target of Sunni extremists, who object to the corruption and decadence among the family’s myriad princes. The princes are gambling that they will not be overthrown as long as they continue to support religious schools and charities linked to the extremists. The Administration’s new strategy is heavily dependent on this bargain.

Nasr compared the current situation to the period in which Al Qaeda first emerged. In the nineteen-eighties and the early nineties, the Saudi government offered to subsidize the covert American C.I.A. proxy war against the Soviet Union in Afghanistan. Hundreds of young Saudis were sent into the border areas of Pakistan, where they set up religious schools, training bases, and recruiting facilities. Then, as now, many of the operatives who were paid with Saudi money were Salafis. Among them, of course, were Osama bin Laden and his associates, who founded Al Qaeda, in 1988.

This time, the U.S. government consultant told me, Bandar and other Saudis have assured the White House that “they will keep a very close eye on the religious fundamentalists. Their message to us was ‘We’ve created this movement, and we can control it.’ It’s not that we don’t want the Salafis to throw bombs; it’s who they throw them at—Hezbollah, Moqtada al-Sadr, Iran, and at the Syrians, if they continue to work with Hezbollah and Iran.”

The Saudi said that, in his country’s view, it was taking a political risk by joining the U.S. in challenging Iran: Bandar is already seen in the Arab world as being too close to the Bush Administration. “We have two nightmares,” the former diplomat told me. “For Iran to acquire the bomb and for the United States to attack Iran. I’d rather the Israelis bomb the Iranians, so we can blame them. If America does it, we will be blamed.”

In the past year, the Saudis, the Israelis, and the Bush Administration have developed a series of informal understandings about their new strategic direction. At least four main elements were involved, the U.S. government consultant told me. First, Israel would be assured that its security was paramount and that Washington and Saudi Arabia and other Sunni states shared its concern about Iran.

Second, the Saudis would urge Hamas, the Islamist Palestinian party that has received support from Iran, to curtail its anti-Israeli aggression and to begin serious talks about sharing leadership with Fatah, the more secular Palestinian group. (In February, the Saudis brokered a deal at Mecca between the two factions. However, Israel and the U.S. have expressed dissatisfaction with the terms.)

The third component was that the Bush Administration would work directly with Sunni nations to counteract Shiite ascendance in the region.

Fourth, the Saudi government, with Washington’s approval, would provide funds and logistical aid to weaken the government of President Bashir Assad, of Syria. The Israelis believe that putting such pressure on the Assad government will make it more conciliatory and open to negotiations. Syria is a major conduit of arms to Hezbollah. The Saudi government is also at odds with the Syrians over the assassination of Rafik Hariri, the former Lebanese Prime Minister, in Beirut in 2005, for which it believes the Assad government was responsible. Hariri, a billionaire Sunni, was closely associated with the Saudi regime and with Prince Bandar. (A U.N. inquiry strongly suggested that the Syrians were involved, but offered no direct evidence; there are plans for another investigation, by an international tribunal.)

Patrick Clawson, of the Washington Institute for Near East Policy, depicted the Saudis’ coöperation with the White House as a significant breakthrough. “The Saudis understand that if they want the Administration to make a more generous political offer to the Palestinians they have to persuade the Arab states to make a more generous offer to the Israelis,” Clawson told me. The new diplomatic approach, he added, “shows a real degree of effort and sophistication as well as a deftness of touch not always associated with this Administration. Who’s running the greater risk—we or the Saudis? At a time when America’s standing in the Middle East is extremely low, the Saudis are actually embracing us. We should count our blessings.”

The Pentagon consultant had a different view. He said that the Administration had turned to Bandar as a “fallback,” because it had realized that the failing war in Iraq could leave the Middle East “up for grabs.”

JIHADIS IN LEBANON

The focus of the U.S.-Saudi relationship, after Iran, is Lebanon, where the Saudis have been deeply involved in efforts by the Administration to support the Lebanese government. Prime Minister Fouad Siniora is struggling to stay in power against a persistent opposition led by Hezbollah, the Shiite organization, and its leader, Sheikh Hassan Nasrallah. Hezbollah has an extensive infrastructure, an estimated two to three thousand active fighters, and thousands of additional members.

Hezbollah has been on the State Department’s terrorist list since 1997. The organization has been implicated in the 1983 bombing of a Marine barracks in Beirut that killed two hundred and forty-one military men. It has also been accused of complicity in the kidnapping of Americans, including the C.I.A. station chief in Lebanon, who died in captivity, and a Marine colonel serving on a U.N. peacekeeping mission, who was killed. (Nasrallah has denied that the group was involved in these incidents.) Nasrallah is seen by many as a staunch terrorist, who has said that he regards Israel as a state that has no right to exist. Many in the Arab world, however, especially Shiites, view him as a resistance leader who withstood Israel in last summer’s thirty-three-day war, and Siniora as a weak politician who relies on America’s support but was unable to persuade President Bush to call for an end to the Israeli bombing of Lebanon. (Photographs of Siniora kissing Condoleezza Rice on the cheek when she visited during the war were prominently displayed during street protests in Beirut.)

The Bush Administration has publicly pledged the Siniora government a billion dollars in aid since last summer. A donors’ conference in Paris, in January, which the U.S. helped organize, yielded pledges of almost eight billion more, including a promise of more than a billion from the Saudis. The American pledge includes more than two hundred million dollars in military aid, and forty million dollars for internal security.

The United States has also given clandestine support to the Siniora government, according to the former senior intelligence official and the U.S. government consultant. “We are in a program to enhance the Sunni capability to resist Shiite influence, and we’re spreading the money around as much as we can,” the former senior intelligence official said. The problem was that such money “always gets in more pockets than you think it will,” he said. “In this process, we’re financing a lot of bad guys with some serious potential unintended consequences. We don’t have the ability to determine and get pay vouchers signed by the people we like and avoid the people we don’t like. It’s a very high-risk venture.”

American, European, and Arab officials I spoke to told me that the Siniora government and its allies had allowed some aid to end up in the hands of emerging Sunni radical groups in northern Lebanon, the Bekaa Valley, and around Palestinian refugee camps in the south. These groups, though small, are seen as a buffer to Hezbollah; at the same time, their ideological ties are with Al Qaeda.

During a conversation with me, the former Saudi diplomat accused Nasrallah of attempting “to hijack the state,” but he also objected to the Lebanese and Saudi sponsorship of Sunni jihadists in Lebanon. “Salafis are sick and hateful, and I’m very much against the idea of flirting with them,” he said. “They hate the Shiites, but they hate Americans more. If you try to outsmart them, they will outsmart us. It will be ugly.”

Alastair Crooke, who spent nearly thirty years in MI6, the British intelligence service, and now works for Conflicts Forum, a think tank in Beirut, told me, “The Lebanese government is opening space for these people to come in. It could be very dangerous.” Crooke said that one Sunni extremist group, Fatah al-Islam, had splintered from its pro-Syrian parent group, Fatah al-Intifada, in the Nahr al-Bared refugee camp, in northern Lebanon. Its membership at the time was less than two hundred. “I was told that within twenty-four hours they were being offered weapons and money by people presenting themselves as representatives of the Lebanese government’s interests—presumably to take on Hezbollah,” Crooke said.

The largest of the groups, Asbat al-Ansar, is situated in the Ain al-Hilweh Palestinian refugee camp. Asbat al-Ansar has received arms and supplies from Lebanese internal-security forces and militias associated with the Siniora government.

In 2005, according to a report by the U.S.-based International Crisis Group, Saad Hariri, the Sunni majority leader of the Lebanese parliament and the son of the slain former Prime Minister—Saad inherited more than four billion dollars after his father’s assassination—paid forty-eight thousand dollars in bail for four members of an Islamic militant group from Dinniyeh. The men had been arrested while trying to establish an Islamic mini-state in northern Lebanon. The Crisis Group noted that many of the militants “had trained in al-Qaeda camps in Afghanistan.”

According to the Crisis Group report, Saad Hariri later used his parliamentary majority to obtain amnesty for twenty-two of the Dinniyeh Islamists, as well as for seven militants suspected of plotting to bomb the Italian and Ukrainian embassies in Beirut, the previous year. (He also arranged a pardon for Samir Geagea, a Maronite Christian militia leader, who had been convicted of four political murders, including the assassination, in 1987, of Prime Minister Rashid Karami.) Hariri described his actions to reporters as humanitarian.

In an interview in Beirut, a senior official in the Siniora government acknowledged that there were Sunni jihadists operating inside Lebanon. “We have a liberal attitude that allows Al Qaeda types to have a presence here,” he said. He related this to concerns that Iran or Syria might decide to turn Lebanon into a “theatre of conflict.”

The official said that his government was in a no-win situation. Without a political settlement with Hezbollah, he said, Lebanon could “slide into a conflict,” in which Hezbollah fought openly with Sunni forces, with potentially horrific consequences. But if Hezbollah agreed to a settlement yet still maintained a separate army, allied with Iran and Syria, “Lebanon could become a target. In both cases, we become a target.”

The Bush Administration has portrayed its support of the Siniora government as an example of the President’s belief in democracy, and his desire to prevent other powers from interfering in Lebanon. When Hezbollah led street demonstrations in Beirut in December, John Bolton, who was then the U.S. Ambassador to the U.N., called them “part of the Iran-Syria-inspired coup.” Leslie H. Gelb, a past president of the Council on Foreign Relations, said that the Administration’s policy was less pro democracy than “pro American national security. The fact is that it would be terribly dangerous if Hezbollah ran Lebanon.” The fall of the Siniora government would be seen, Gelb said, “as a signal in the Middle East of the decline of the United States and the ascendancy of the terrorism threat. And so any change in the distribution of political power in Lebanon has to be opposed by the United States—and we’re justified in helping any non-Shiite parties resist that change. We should say this publicly, instead of talking about democracy.”

Martin Indyk, of the Saban Center, said, however, that the United States “does not have enough pull to stop the moderates in Lebanon from dealing with the extremists.” He added, “The President sees the region as divided between moderates and extremists, but our regional friends see it as divided between Sunnis and Shia. The Sunnis that we view as extremists are regarded by our Sunni allies simply as Sunnis.”

In January, after an outburst of street violence in Beirut involving supporters of both the Siniora government and Hezbollah, Prince Bandar flew to Tehran to discuss the political impasse in Lebanon and to meet with Ali Larijani, the Iranians’ negotiator on nuclear issues. According to a Middle Eastern ambassador, Bandar’s mission—which the ambassador said was endorsed by the White House—also aimed “to create problems between the Iranians and Syria.” There had been tensions between the two countries about Syrian talks with Israel, and the Saudis’ goal was to encourage a breach. However, the ambassador said, “It did not work. Syria and Iran are not going to betray each other. Bandar’s approach is very unlikely to succeed.”

Walid Jumblatt, who is the leader of the Druze minority in Lebanon and a strong Siniora supporter, has attacked Nasrallah as an agent of Syria, and has repeatedly told foreign journalists that Hezbollah is under the direct control of the religious leadership in Iran. In a conversation with me last December, he depicted Bashir Assad, the Syrian President, as a “serial killer.” Nasrallah, he said, was “morally guilty” of the assassination of Rafik Hariri and the murder, last November, of Pierre Gemayel, a member of the Siniora Cabinet, because of his support for the Syrians.

Jumblatt then told me that he had met with Vice-President Cheney in Washington last fall to discuss, among other issues, the possibility of undermining Assad. He and his colleagues advised Cheney that, if the United States does try to move against Syria, members of the Syrian Muslim Brotherhood would be “the ones to talk to,” Jumblatt said.

The Syrian Muslim Brotherhood, a branch of a radical Sunni movement founded in Egypt in 1928, engaged in more than a decade of violent opposition to the regime of Hafez Assad, Bashir’s father. In 1982, the Brotherhood took control of the city of Hama; Assad bombarded the city for a week, killing between six thousand and twenty thousand people. Membership in the Brotherhood is punishable by death in Syria. The Brotherhood is also an avowed enemy of the U.S. and of Israel. Nevertheless, Jumblatt said, “We told Cheney that the basic link between Iran and Lebanon is Syria—and to weaken Iran you need to open the door to effective Syrian opposition.”

There is evidence that the Administration’s redirection strategy has already benefitted the Brotherhood. The Syrian National Salvation Front is a coalition of opposition groups whose principal members are a faction led by Abdul Halim Khaddam, a former Syrian Vice-President who defected in 2005, and the Brotherhood. A former high-ranking C.I.A. officer told me, “The Americans have provided both political and financial support. The Saudis are taking the lead with financial support, but there is American involvement.” He said that Khaddam, who now lives in Paris, was getting money from Saudi Arabia, with the knowledge of the White House. (In 2005, a delegation of the Front’s members met with officials from the National Security Council, according to press reports.) A former White House official told me that the Saudis had provided members of the Front with travel documents.

Jumblatt said he understood that the issue was a sensitive one for the White House. “I told Cheney that some people in the Arab world, mainly the Egyptians”—whose moderate Sunni leadership has been fighting the Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood for decades—“won’t like it if the United States helps the Brotherhood. But if you don’t take on Syria we will be face to face in Lebanon with Hezbollah in a long fight, and one we might not win.”

THE SHEIKH

On a warm, clear night early last December, in a bombed-out suburb a few miles south of downtown Beirut, I got a preview of how the Administration’s new strategy might play out in Lebanon. Sheikh Hassan Nasrallah, the Hezbollah leader, who has been in hiding, had agreed to an interview. Security arrangements for the meeting were secretive and elaborate. I was driven, in the back seat of a darkened car, to a damaged underground garage somewhere in Beirut, searched with a handheld scanner, placed in a second car to be driven to yet another bomb-scarred underground garage, and transferred again. Last summer, it was reported that Israel was trying to kill Nasrallah, but the extraordinary precautions were not due only to that threat. Nasrallah’s aides told me that they believe he is a prime target of fellow-Arabs, primarily Jordanian intelligence operatives, as well as Sunni jihadists who they believe are affiliated with Al Qaeda. (The government consultant and a retired four-star general said that Jordanian intelligence, with support from the U.S. and Israel, had been trying to infiltrate Shiite groups, to work against Hezbollah. Jordan’s King Abdullah II has warned that a Shiite government in Iraq that was close to Iran would lead to the emergence of a Shiite crescent.) This is something of an ironic turn: Nasrallah’s battle with Israel last summer turned him—a Shiite—into the most popular and influential figure among Sunnis and Shiites throughout the region. In recent months, however, he has increasingly been seen by many Sunnis not as a symbol of Arab unity but as a participant in a sectarian war.

Nasrallah, dressed, as usual, in religious garb, was waiting for me in an unremarkable apartment. One of his advisers said that he was not likely to remain there overnight; he has been on the move since his decision, last July, to order the kidnapping of two Israeli soldiers in a cross-border raid set off the thirty-three-day war. Nasrallah has since said publicly—and repeated to me—that he misjudged the Israeli response. “We just wanted to capture prisoners for exchange purposes,” he told me. “We never wanted to drag the region into war.” Nasrallah accused the Bush Administration of working with Israel to deliberately instigate fitna, an Arabic word that is used to mean “insurrection and fragmentation within Islam.” “In my opinion, there is a huge campaign through the media throughout the world to put each side up against the other,” he said. “I believe that all this is being run by American and Israeli intelligence.” (He did not provide any specific evidence for this.) He said that the U.S. war in Iraq had increased sectarian tensions, but argued that Hezbollah had tried to prevent them from spreading into Lebanon. (Sunni-Shiite confrontations increased, along with violence, in the weeks after we talked.)

Nasrallah said he believed that President Bush’s goal was “the drawing of a new map for the region. They want the partition of Iraq. Iraq is not on the edge of a civil war—there is a civil war. There is ethnic and sectarian cleansing. The daily killing and displacement which is taking place in Iraq aims at achieving three Iraqi parts, which will be sectarian and ethnically pure as a prelude to the partition of Iraq. Within one or two years at the most, there will be total Sunni areas, total Shiite areas, and total Kurdish areas. Even in Baghdad, there is a fear that it might be divided into two areas, one Sunni and one Shiite.”

He went on, “I can say that President Bush is lying when he says he does not want Iraq to be partitioned. All the facts occurring now on the ground make you swear he is dragging Iraq to partition. And a day will come when he will say, ‘I cannot do anything, since the Iraqis want the partition of their country and I honor the wishes of the people of Iraq.’ ”

Nasrallah said he believed that America also wanted to bring about the partition of Lebanon and of Syria. In Syria, he said, the result would be to push the country “into chaos and internal battles like in Iraq.” In Lebanon, “There will be a Sunni state, an Alawi state, a Christian state, and a Druze state.” But, he said, “I do not know if there will be a Shiite state.” Nasrallah told me that he suspected that one aim of the Israeli bombing of Lebanon last summer was “the destruction of Shiite areas and the displacement of Shiites from Lebanon. The idea was to have the Shiites of Lebanon and Syria flee to southern Iraq,” which is dominated by Shiites. “I am not sure, but I smell this,” he told me.

Partition would leave Israel surrounded by “small tranquil states,” he said. “I can assure you that the Saudi kingdom will also be divided, and the issue will reach to North African states. There will be small ethnic and confessional states,” he said. “In other words, Israel will be the most important and the strongest state in a region that has been partitioned into ethnic and confessional states that are in agreement with each other. This is the new Middle East.”

In fact, the Bush Administration has adamantly resisted talk of partitioning Iraq, and its public stances suggest that the White House sees a future Lebanon that is intact, with a weak, disarmed Hezbollah playing, at most, a minor political role. There is also no evidence to support Nasrallah’s belief that the Israelis were seeking to drive the Shiites into southern Iraq. Nevertheless, Nasrallah’s vision of a larger sectarian conflict in which the United States is implicated suggests a possible consequence of the White House’s new strategy.

In the interview, Nasrallah made mollifying gestures and promises that would likely be met with skepticism by his opponents. “If the United States says that discussions with the likes of us can be useful and influential in determining American policy in the region, we have no objection to talks or meetings,” he said. “But, if their aim through this meeting is to impose their policy on us, it will be a waste of time.” He said that the Hezbollah militia, unless attacked, would operate only within the borders of Lebanon, and pledged to disarm it when the Lebanese Army was able to stand up. Nasrallah said that he had no interest in initiating another war with Israel. However, he added that he was anticipating, and preparing for, another Israeli attack, later this year.

Nasrallah further insisted that the street demonstrations in Beirut would continue until the Siniora government fell or met his coalition’s political demands. “Practically speaking, this government cannot rule,” he told me. “It might issue orders, but the majority of the Lebanese people will not abide and will not recognize the legitimacy of this government. Siniora remains in office because of international support, but this does not mean that Siniora can rule Lebanon.” President Bush’s repeated praise of the Siniora government, Nasrallah said, “is the best service to the Lebanese opposition he can give, because it weakens their position vis-à-vis the Lebanese people and the Arab and Islamic populations. They are betting on us getting tired. We did not get tired during the war, so how could we get tired in a demonstration?”

There is sharp division inside and outside the Bush Administration about how best to deal with Nasrallah, and whether he could, in fact, be a partner in a political settlement. The outgoing director of National Intelligence, John Negroponte, in a farewell briefing to the Senate Intelligence Committee, in January, said that Hezbollah “lies at the center of Iran’s terrorist strategy… . It could decide to conduct attacks against U.S. interests in the event it feels its survival or that of Iran is threatened… . Lebanese Hezbollah sees itself as Tehran’s partner.” In 2002, Richard Armitage, then the Deputy Secretary of State, called Hezbollah “the A-team” of terrorists. In a recent interview, however, Armitage acknowledged that the issue has become somewhat more complicated. Nasrallah, Armitage told me, has emerged as “a political force of some note, with a political role to play inside Lebanon if he chooses to do so.” In terms of public relations and political gamesmanship, Armitage said, Nasrallah “is the smartest man in the Middle East.” But, he added, Nasrallah “has got to make it clear that he wants to play an appropriate role as the loyal opposition. For me, there’s still a blood debt to pay”—a reference to the murdered colonel and the Marine barracks bombing.

Robert Baer, a former longtime C.I.A. agent in Lebanon, has been a severe critic of Hezbollah and has warned of its links to Iranian-sponsored terrorism. But now, he told me, “we’ve got Sunni Arabs preparing for cataclysmic conflict, and we will need somebody to protect the Christians in Lebanon. It used to be the French and the United States who would do it, and now it’s going to be Nasrallah and the Shiites.

“The most important story in the Middle East is the growth of Nasrallah from a street guy to a leader—from a terrorist to a statesman,” Baer added. “The dog that didn’t bark this summer”—during the war with Israel—“is Shiite terrorism.” Baer was referring to fears that Nasrallah, in addition to firing rockets into Israel and kidnapping its soldiers, might set in motion a wave of terror attacks on Israeli and American targets around the world. “He could have pulled the trigger, but he did not,” Baer said.

Most members of the intelligence and diplomatic communities acknowledge Hezbollah’s ongoing ties to Iran. But there is disagreement about the extent to which Nasrallah would put aside Hezbollah’s interests in favor of Iran’s. A former C.I.A. officer who also served in Lebanon called Nasrallah “a Lebanese phenomenon,” adding, “Yes, he’s aided by Iran and Syria, but Hezbollah’s gone beyond that.” He told me that there was a period in the late eighties and early nineties when the C.I.A. station in Beirut was able to clandestinely monitor Nasrallah’s conversations. He described Nasrallah as “a gang leader who was able to make deals with the other gangs. He had contacts with everybody.”

TELLING CONGRESS

The Bush Administration’s reliance on clandestine operations that have not been reported to Congress and its dealings with intermediaries with questionable agendas have recalled, for some in Washington, an earlier chapter in history. Two decades ago, the Reagan Administration attempted to fund the Nicaraguan contras illegally, with the help of secret arms sales to Iran. Saudi money was involved in what became known as the Iran-Contra scandal, and a few of the players back then—notably Prince Bandar and Elliott Abrams—are involved in today’s dealings. Iran-Contra was the subject of an informal “lessons learned” discussion two years ago among veterans of the scandal. Abrams led the discussion. One conclusion was that even though the program was eventually exposed, it had been possible to execute it without telling Congress. As to what the experience taught them, in terms of future covert operations, the participants found: “One, you can’t trust our friends. Two, the C.I.A. has got to be totally out of it. Three, you can’t trust the uniformed military, and four, it’s got to be run out of the Vice-President’s office”—a reference to Cheney’s role, the former senior intelligence official said.

I was subsequently told by the two government consultants and the former senior intelligence official that the echoes of Iran-Contra were a factor in Negroponte’s decision to resign from the National Intelligence directorship and accept a sub-Cabinet position of Deputy Secretary of State. (Negroponte declined to comment.)

The former senior intelligence official also told me that Negroponte did not want a repeat of his experience in the Reagan Administration, when he served as Ambassador to Honduras. “Negroponte said, ‘No way. I’m not going down that road again, with the N.S.C. running operations off the books, with no finding.’ ” (In the case of covert C.I.A. operations, the President must issue a written finding and inform Congress.) Negroponte stayed on as Deputy Secretary of State, he added, because “he believes he can influence the government in a positive way.”

The government consultant said that Negroponte shared the White House’s policy goals but “wanted to do it by the book.” The Pentagon consultant also told me that “there was a sense at the senior-ranks level that he wasn’t fully on board with the more adventurous clandestine initiatives.” It was also true, he said, that Negroponte “had problems with this Rube Goldberg policy contraption for fixing the Middle East.”

The Pentagon consultant added that one difficulty, in terms of oversight, was accounting for covert funds. “There are many, many pots of black money, scattered in many places and used all over the world on a variety of missions,” he said. The budgetary chaos in Iraq, where billions of dollars are unaccounted for, has made it a vehicle for such transactions, according to the former senior intelligence official and the retired four-star general.

“This goes back to Iran-Contra,” a former National Security Council aide told me. “And much of what they’re doing is to keep the agency out of it.” He said that Congress was not being briefed on the full extent of the U.S.-Saudi operations. And, he said, “The C.I.A. is asking, ‘What’s going on?’ They’re concerned, because they think it’s amateur hour.”

The issue of oversight is beginning to get more attention from Congress. Last November, the Congressional Research Service issued a report for Congress on what it depicted as the Administration’s blurring of the line between C.I.A. activities and strictly military ones, which do not have the same reporting requirements. And the Senate Intelligence Committee, headed by Senator Jay Rockefeller, has scheduled a hearing for March 8th on Defense Department intelligence activities.

Senator Ron Wyden, of Oregon, a Democrat who is a member of the Intelligence Committee, told me, “The Bush Administration has frequently failed to meet its legal obligation to keep the Intelligence Committee fully and currently informed. Time and again, the answer has been ‘Trust us.’ ” Wyden said, “It is hard for me to trust the Administration.”

Cohabitation - South Lebanon's Martyrs (film)

An interesting (almost silent) film about the pictures of martyr's in South Lebanon.

a film by Muzna Al-Masri

She writes: "The idea of the film emerged as I was looking for visual elements that would portray how south Lebanese, in view of the summer 2006 war they lived through, were starting the year 2007. Five months after the 2006 Israeli Attack on Lebanon, south Lebanese were struggling to erase the marks that the summer fighting has left on the physical space they inhabit. The whole of south Lebanon felt like one huge construction project, managed by hundreds of small scale, mostly local, contractors.

Reconstruction and its related sounds dominated the scene, yet on the walls of the houses and small shops, locally printed calendars had appeared; I understood them as the villages' pronunciation of how they plan to live their new year. Images of the political leaders declared their political allegiance, seizing space within the house neighbouring teddy bears and images of loved ones. Yet the role of the calendars took another meaning when in one of the villages, Srifa, the locally printed calendar of the communist party had the photographs of the nine martyrs of the party from the village. I contemplated what that would mean to a person who has to face the images of these martyrs every morning as they tear off the sheet of the day that has passed; and what if that image you had to see every morning is that of a friend, a husband, a son? Yet the images did not reside in the calendar alone. They were everywhere, on the streets, at the entrances of the houses of their families, in living rooms and on mobile phones. A self imposed reminder of the summer attack; one that people were attempting to cherish rather than erase.

To think through that presence of the imagery, one could take many routes. What is the mythological meaning of martyrdom? How is it linked to the religious cultural world-view, and that of Shiisim in particular? What socio-political function do the images play? How does their presence ensure a continued political allegiance to the political cause and side they were killed for? Who paid for the cost of printing these photos? And who was the graphic designer that ensured the whole animated image plays the right function?

The martyr as both Super-Human and Non-human I filmed in Aita El-Shaeb, a village of around 10,000 inhabitants on the Lebanese Israeli border. The village was hit hard during the summer attack, and although had no civilian casualties, lost nine of the Hezbollah fighters from the village during the fighting.

The people behind the images are physically dead, but life continues around them. They habitat the same place were lentil soup is being made for the sick members of their family, the little brother of one of the martyrs is first on his class, while the sister of another just had a baby. But are they really dead, the people behind the image?

According to Barthes, “the photograph does not necessarily say what is no longer, but only and for certain what has been” (1984: 85). Yet, what the photograph has to say is dependent too on where it is displayed, and what its “spectator” has within him in knowledge and emotion to engage with it. As such, the same image of the martyr at once reminds us that the person was once alive and he no longer is. By that he no longer is, he is given another life, a non-human one; either a super-human or sub-human one, or indeed both.

One practice that started with “Sana' Muhaydli” in 1985, who at the age of 17 implemented a suicide/martyrdom operation in south Lebanon against an Israeli convoy, was the taping of a video, broadcast on Lebanese television after her death, which she started by the following statement: “I am the martyr Sana' Yusif Muhaydli”. Discussing that self proclamation of death, Toufic sates that: “The dead is no one, as is made clear by the mirror device in vampire films, the vampire not appearing in the speculum; however the dead is not one name, but all the names of history, and therefore, synecdochically, everyone.” (2002: 79).

In that same clip, Sana' Muhaydli says “I am not dead, but alive amidst you..” (quoted in Toufic, 2002: 78), echoing the Qura’nic concept, of martyrs continuing to live after their death, as these two verses of many assert: “And call not those who are slain in the way of Allah "dead." Nay, they are living, only ye perceive not.” (The Noble Qura’n, 2:154) and “Think not of those, who are slain in the way of Allah, as dead. Nay, they are living. With their Lord they have provision.” (The Noble Quran, 3:169).

Martyrs arguably continue to live according to the popular Islamic belief in as much as the cause they died for continues to exist. That continuity in life is possible only by the fact that they continue to “live” as public figures, pronounced and alleviated in status as martyrs, and maintaining a distinguishable identity for the living. As such, the owners of the image of a martyr are not the ones who were closest to him before he died, but those who share the cause he died for, and in case of the martyrs from Aita El-Saheb it is Hizbullah. In February 2007, Hizbullah members asserted the value of the martyrs in their political struggle as they raised their images on the Lebanese border. On the erected posters, that also showed slogans and the place date of each martyr's death (that is, the martyr's date of birth), Haidar Daqmaq, Hizbullah spokesman said the banners were raised "so that enemy soldiers and residents of the border settlements can see them clearly." (quoted in Naharnet 6/2/2007)

We can draw parallels from the Palestinian situation, as in Sharro's discussion of the concept of martyrdom as a manifestation of Palestinian dehumanisation: The 'shaheed' is elevated to a mythological status that is considered a fulfilment of the Palestinian’s existential role. The loss of life is not classified as a human loss, but rather as a gain and a contribution towards the requirements of the Palestinian 'warrior' identity. (Sadek et al, 2002)

As such the “post death” identity becomes reduced to that of “The Martyr”, for he is only worthy of distinction because of his death, and the identity that he possessed before his death, is now marginal, or is of value only to the extent that it has contributed to creating that martyr in him. The erosion of the pre-martyrdom identity was discussed by several artists, most notably by Lebanese performer Rabih Mroue in his 2000 work “Three Posters” and by Palestinian film-maker Hany Abu-Assad in his 2006 film, Paradise Now. As “the soon to become martyr” in Paradise Now attempts to read to the camera his post martyrdom statement, reference to his present life, his day-to-day worries is seen to fall out of what the “film director” of that video allows.

Who then is the person whose image sits inside the family house, for the people who once knew him most to see every day?

According to Barthes, contemplating his “discovery” after looking through the photos of his mother: “Seeing a bottle, an iris stalk, a chicken, a palace photographed involves only reality. But a body, a face, and what is more, frequently, the body and face of a beloved person? Since photography authenticates the existence of a certain being, I want to discover that being in the photograph completely, i.e. in its essence. ‘as into itself..’ beyond simple resemblance whether legal or hereditary” (1981: 107) But what then is the essence we are 'permitted' to discover of the now martyrs when we are to look only at selected photos of them and when their identity has been transformed in public?

Posing for the photographs did the martyrs, as “objects” (appropriately termed by Barthes) of the photos, contemplate the possible future use of that same photo? Would they have posed differently had they known the use of the image? What photos were chosen and by whom? And, where did all the other photos that portray more of the person's identity go? Where are the photos of them with their children and loved ones, and how come they are absent even from the privacy of their own homes?

While the above questions remain unanswered for now, the questions I will look further into is: when the image of the son, the brother who once lived is replaced within the home, by that of the martyr, what does it bring with it?

Colombian sculpture Doris Salcedo in a 1998 series deals with the intrusion of the experience of violence into the private space, as she fills items of furniture, one of which is closet, with concrete to depict that violation of the domestic space. This becomes even more of relevant seeing women' experience of political violence. Analyzing women’s testimonies to the South African “Truth and Reconciliation Commission”, Ross discusses women’s discourse as one of domesticity, locating the individual in the wider web of social relations, in the family, in one’s relationship with time and with silence. (Ross, 2001)

Can one then see the 'transformed' photograph of a loved image, a photo that becomes the reminder of the public, i.e. the war in which the community has lived, as the concrete that fills the closet in the home?"