By Kaveh L Afrasiabi
Asia Times Online

Back from the brink, fragile Lebanon can breathe again, thanks to the timely intervention of the Arab League which, no matter how divided and polarized, managed to pull off a big one by convincing the Lebanese government to rescind its controversial decisions that had triggered the latest crisis. This was the removal of the head of Beirut Airport and an assault on a nerve center of the Hezbollah-led resistance, its communication network.

So, as the guns begin to fall silent in Beirut, Tripoli and elsewhere in Lebanon and fractious Lebanon and the outside world reflect on what transpired this past several days on the eve of President George W Bush's Middle East trip, it has become fairly obvious that the Saudi Arabia accusation of an Iran-inspired Hezbollah "coup" is a total misnomer. Indeed, the more apt term is a "government coup and Hezbollah's successful counter-coup".

This does not sit well with pro-Israel pundits in the US, such as Thomas Friedman, who in his latest commentary titled "New Cold War" in the New York Times, gives the following mischaracterization:

The outrage of the week is the Iranian-Syrian-Hezbollah attempt to take over Lebanon. Hezbollah thugs pushed into Sunni neighborhoods in west Beirut, focusing particular attention on crushing progressive news outlets like Future TV, so Hezbollah's propaganda machine could dominate the airwaves. The Shi'ite militia Hezbollah emerged supposedly to protect Lebanon from Israel. Having done that, it has now turned around and sold Lebanon to Syria and Iran.

No mention is made of Hezbollah's allies, such as Amal or the Free Patriotic Movement led by former prime minister Michel Aoun, a leading foe of current Prime Minister Fouad Siniora. Rather, the Cold War reductionism leads people to the Manichean, good guy, bad guy, bifurcation where the "ruthless" Iranians are supposedly winning against the "dumb" America and its "feckless" Sunni Arab allies.

Further, a look at the behavior of Arab League delegates in Beirut this week makes it evident that the neat division of "moderates" versus "radicals" simply does not wash. Qatar and Algeria threw their weight behind Syria and openly questioned Saudi Arabia's anti-Iran rush to judgment. Saudi Arabia will now either temper its Washington-style anti-Hezbollah rhetoric or it will find itself increasingly isolated in the Arab world, including among its brethren in the Gulf Cooperation Council, who recognize the Saudi error of prioritizing its criticisms of Hezbollah over its stance on Israel.

It is also overlooked that until recently, Saudi Arabia, Iran and France engaged in a collaborative effort over Lebanon, which needs to be resuscitated now irrespective of their differences. Iran has just submitted its vision of security cooperation to resolve regional and global crises, and the West would be remiss to ignore Tehran's commitments and not to ask for actions to back its words.

The use of "new cold war" terminology is a verbal surrogate, or rather subterfuge, for Israel to befriend conservative Arab states with respect to the regional strategic environment, thus bypassing the core issue of Palestinian rights. But, again, it is conveniently overlooked that about 60 years of Arab-Israeli cold war has been punctuated with periodic hot wars.

One can't deny that there is a burgeoning US-Iran power game in the Middle East, but in light of the sheer size of shared or parallel interests between them - in Iraq, in Afghanistan against Taliban, al-Qaeda, energy insecurity - the appellation "cold war" tends to obfuscate the complex, mixed-motive games of strategy between the two sides, compared with the relatively straightforward superpower rivalry during the Cold War.

So if the "new cold war" is not exactly a replica of the old Cold War, then by definition the transition out of it, or away from it, looks different as well. For one thing, it could mean exploring and finding new points of coinciding interests, for example in Iraq, through meaningful security dialogue, which is a lot more promising than a simple case of "confidence-building" measures Cold-War-style.

And co-management of regional crises, by the US and Iran, is not an impossibility, even though a minor "paradigm change" with respect to the US's hegemonic global management would be necessary to make this happen.

Here, the US can actually draw a precious lesson from its mini-debacle in Lebanon: blunting and suppressing Iran's "proxy" is not an effective ploy, particularly as it militates against the country's internal balance of forces - that are shaped in part by external influences.

Hezbollah's successful "counter-coup" accomplished its principal goal of defeating a concerted effort to deplete its capability and its leadership (with reports of failed plots against Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah in the past weeks), and to undermine its credibility. This was to be done by stigmatizing it as an Iranian puppet pure and simple. Capability and credibility are linked, however, and the ferocity of US pundits' Hezbollah-bashing is only indicative of their hidden anger and frustration at the coup that failed.
 

Submitted by awakenedgoyim on Thu, 2008-05-15 13:15

• awakenedgoyim's blog
• Login or register to post comments
• 101 reads
•