Postmortem on the Israel-Hizbollah media war

Sentient people nowadays don't need a lot of reminding of the political bias and limitations of the mainstream news media (MSM). But a distinctive event well-defined in time and scope can be a moment for some systematic research that captures these issues more thoroughly than just impressionistic snapshots during the event.

Such an event was last summer's month-long war between Israel and Hizbollah, the Iranian- and Syrian-sponsored Shi'ite militia of southern Lebanon. A new study (PDF) from the Shorenstein Center at the Kennedy School of Government (Harvard) captures perfectly the MSM's combination of ignorance, clueless bias, and gullibility. The authors are Marvin Kalb, formerly of CBS and NBC and now a Shorenstein fellow, and Carol Saivetz, an associate and lecturer at Harvard's Davis Center for Russian studies. Their most fundamental conclusion is that the media is no longer an independent observer, nor is it an advocate in its own right. Instead, it's become an unconscious or conscious propaganda tool - a tool almost always better manipulated by groups such as Hizbollah or dictatorships like Iran than by open societies like Israel. As they say at the Pentagon, it's now part of the "battle space." Another bad omen for the future of press freedom.

But there's a bright side: bloggers! Today, when the MSM messes up, they get fact-checked and carefully sifted in ways unimaginable even 10 years ago. All the more reason why we need to remember that First Amendment freedoms are individual rights of everyone, not corporate or guild privileges.

Middle East blog ferment

Some of my previous posts on the Middle East have emitted an unmistakeable aroma of pessimism about the place, leaving me wondering if I'm just too damn negative. Are there any positive trends? Yes, there are. I don't know how significant they are, but they are. One of those trends is bloggers and their sometimes-brazen challenge to both authoritarian governments and authoritarian cultures.

The bloggers in question are often brave, in ways that bored and pampered Americans can't even begin to understand. Many must use pseudonyms or noms de blog. Here's a partial list (partial in multiple senses), a taste of what the Middle East has to offer. Whatever my serious doubts about the future of the Middle East, I hope these bloggers prove me wrong!

I've organized the list by country/region and picked the ones I know the best. But that's just my experience and bias. Many of these sites have links to other bloggers, who shouldn't be missed. Be adventurous. Notice also that many of them, like Kavanna, are housed by Blogspot/Blogger. It's Google's mitzvah, whatever else they might do right.

North Africa: I couldn't find many here. These are two I've looked at a few times.
* The Moor Next Door (Algeria)
* Winds of Change in Algeria (Algeria, mostly in French, some English)

Egypt: Largest and most important Arab country, with small but active blogging culture, not as conservative as the Gulf countries (see below). Nonetheless, the Egyptian government can move slowly but effectively against bloggers it doesn't like.
* Big Pharaoh
* Mona Eltahawy (blog by a well-known professional journalist)
* Sandmonkey (Abdel Kareem Nabil Soliman - now the best-known Egyptian blogger, because he was recently sentenced by the Egyptian government for his blogging)

Lebanon: Very active and varied blogging culture. Played an important role in covering the March 2005 protest movement against Syria and the Hizbollah war last summer. Israeli bloggers (see below) and Lebanese bloggers communicated via blogs even as the missiles and bombs were dropping.
* Lebanese Political Journal (important multi-blogger site)
* Lebanese Bloggers (clearinghouse for many individual blogs)
* Daily Star (Lebanon's most important newspaper, in English)

Iraq: In spite of all the violence in and around Baghdad, Iraq has a significant and very informative blog culture. It's a useful corrective to the inevitably misleading conventional media coverage of Iraq.
* Salam Pax (the famous pseudonymous "Raed" of pre-2003 fame, who went off the air in 2004 - he has a book out)
* Iraq the Model (best-known and most important Iraqi blog)
* The Messopotamian (Alaa is the pseudonym - life in Baghdad)
* Iraq Pundit (an Iraqi exile comments from afar)

Perisan Gulf: The most conservative part of the Middle East, outside of Talibanland, dominated by the Salafi (Wahhabi) school. These bloggers have to tiptoe.
* Silly Bahraini Girl
* Saudi Jeans
* Arab News (the most important English-language Saudi newspaper)

Iran: The largest and most active of Middle Eastern blogging cultures, apart from Israel. Bloggers there play a complicated cat-and-mouse game with the Iranian government. There are too many blogs for me keep track of. Here's a partial list. If you look at only one, look at this one:
* Hoder (Hossein Derakhshan - he has a Persian blog too)

Israel: Israeli has a large number of blogs, some more active than others; some highly political, others mostly personal. Ones I look at:
* Israpundit (multi-blogger, with an excellent linked list of other blogs)
* IsraellyCool (Australian and Israeli - check it out)
* An Unsealed Room (Allison Sommer's sharp-witted diary from a Tel Aviv suburb)

Another newspaper I should mention is Al Hayat, the London-based independent, Arabic-language publication. They have an English edition. And all serious students of the Middle East must keep up with MEMRI (Middle East Media Research Institute), which bridges the language gap between Arabic-, Farsi-, and Turkish-language media and English.

Finally, anyone who thinks or writes about the Middle East these days is indebted to the indefatigable Michael Totten, who has without question the best English-language blog on the region. In a just world, his lengthy postings would be articles in the New Yorker or Atlantic. When you visit his site, consider donating via PayPal. I don't think he has any other regular source of income right now.

Where do we go from here?

In my last pre-election post, I bemoaned the political situation in the US as one party getting it wrong and the other not getting it at all. I didn't make any predictions, but the election results were more favorable to the Democrats than I expected. It looks as if they might control both houses (counting Lieberman as a Democrat). Expect two years of gridlock. (A better outcome would have been a Dem Senate and Rep House, but, oh well.) I think my mistaken view was based on concentraing too much on Bush and Iraq. This election was, of course, about Congress, not Bush, and voters have lots of good reasons to be very unhappy with the congressional Republicans. We also live in an era of rapid political cycling. What used to take years now takes months. But there are implications beyond Congress nonetheless.

There will be intense pressure on Bush to force Rumsfeld out and to leave Iraq as quickly as possible, by 2008 at the latest. (The Pentagon's original timetable for Iraq was to leave in 2008 anyway.) Iraq will move from a half-baked civil war to a fully-baked one, and Iran will effectively control the southern half of Iraq, to the extent that anyone controls it. It's been the case that American foreign policy since 9/11 has been strangely favorable to Iranian interests, and the Iranian government has been both riled up by American intervention in the region, but at the same time, liberated by the removal of two regimes (the Taliban and Saddam) that they viewed as threats. Even with the recent drops in oil prices, expect Iran to feel its oats as never before in the next 2-3 years, running up to the moment when they have functional nuclear weapons. The Iranians are likely not to use those weapons, but once they have them, expect a regional arms race. The Republicans will make big hay out these developments in 2008, especially after soldiers start returning from Iraq and embarass the Democrats. But the Republicans can't expect voters to give them a free pass on spectacular incompetence forever.

More generally, especially after 2008, expect a gradual American withdrawal from global commitments. The Democrats are still in the confused state of having no foreign policy and most of them still look back nostalgically on the post-1945 era of America leading willing allies. What they don't realize yet is that the post-1945 liberal internationalist era, with its institutions, processes, and so on, is dying, if not dead already. The US will be in less and less of position to prevent regional arms races, regional conflicts, and trade wars. American foreign policy is headed towards a much narrower construal of US interests. Democrats, once the party of foreign affairs, have largely lost interest in the rest of the world. The implication is that US allies will have to start figuring out their own futures and redeveloping their own military and foreign policies. Expect regional instability in east Asia, for example, a much lower profile for the US in the Middle East, and a polite American write-off of Europe. Unilateral Israeli action has already become more comon, with no imaginary pot-at-the-end-of-the-rainbow "peace process." The whole range of Middle East conflicts has now gone full circle back to being religious, not nationalistic. Few in the US really understand this yet, but we soon will.

The voter mood in the US hasn't suddenly become more liberal. The large number of conservative or "blue-dog" Democrats winning in this election indicates something else, roughly similar to the early 1990s. The voter mood is populist - anti-free-trade, anti-immigration, and suspicious of foreign policy involvements. The Republicans have stirred the expectations of populist voters, then disappointed or angered them. That's a sure way for politicians to get into trouble. Read what George Will has to say: The Iraq war, like the Alaska bridge, pungently proclaims how Republicans earned their rebuke. They are guilty of apostasy from conservative principles at home (frugality, limited government) and embrace of anti-conservative principles abroad (nation-building grandiosity pursued incompetently).

POSTSCRIPT: Rumsfeld has resigned. His apparent successor, Robert Gates, has a tough job ahead of him, pulling out American troops from a country with an accelerating civil war. Unlike Vietnam, the so-called (Sunni) "insurgency" will not win, but will be crushed by the Iranian-backed triumph of the Shi'ites. Within a couple years, Iraq will be three countries. American relations with key Sunni allies (Saudi Arabia, Jordan, Egypt) will be strained beyond anything seen before.

Expect darkness to reign in the Middle East for the next while, starting with another war in Lebanon, superficially against Israel, but in reality to break Lebanon for good. The same forces will be at work in Iraq.

Thoughts-in-parallel from Michael Totten.

More realism

The October issue of The American Spectator has a fine article by James Kurth on the chequered history of democratization in American foreign policy, from the post-Civil War South to Iraq. It's a well-written and thought-through piece by someone who clearly knows what he's talking about, from an essentially realist perspective.

Kurth doesn't poo-poo democratization. But he compares cases to illuminate why democratization fails or succeeds. The critical factors include previous liberal-democratic practices and large middle and working classes with a big vested interest in the rule of law, representative institutions, and nonviolent political change. The failure mode awaiting countries that don't have these factors is either ethnic break-up (like Yugoslavia, Lebanon, and Iraq) or populist democracy (rather than liberal democracy). The latter is what's happening in Russia and Venezuela: a one-man authoritarian system headed towards dictatorship with only vestiges of democratic practices. It's what happened to Italy in 1922-24, then Germany in 1930-33.

Unfortunately, the article is available on their Web site only to subscribers. But you can rush out to your local bookstore and buy it. You might scruple to avoid TAS as a right-wing rag, but enjoy Ben Stein if you can't enjoy the rest.

Hey, you, off of my cloud

Middle East: case study: the tribal world of power-challenging. Nasrallah and Hizbollah threaten to throw Bin Laden and al-Qaeda off the jihad popcharts (requires TNR subscription). This has a sick-comic aspect to it, as JihadWatch explains.

EXTRA: To sign a petition to the US State Department to deny Iranian chief cleric Khatami a visa into the US, click here.

LATER: Oh well: Khatami got his visa. More about the Shia and their contemporary role in the Islamic world and the Middle East from Naval Postgraduate School professor Vali Nasr at BookTV (C-SPAN2).

At the bookstore recently, I again encountered Yale law professor Amy Chua's fine book of a few years ago, World on Fire. It explains why democratization and marketization of countries not ready for either is a really bad idea, a point Nasr also elaborates on. Briefly, the sudden transition immediately creates big winners and losers. This seems to be a growing decade-plus-long failure of globalization. It poses a potentially fatal danger to any hope that the Islamic world can be integrated peacefully into global civilization. It is also a major source of anti-Americanism.

Update on Middle East madness

Lots of stuff whizzing and banging around the blogosphere about Israel and the Middle East. Following up on my two earlier postings on Middle East lunacy and deep background, here are an additional two cents.

The narrow problem for Israel is dismantling or pushing out Hizbollah. Israel has obviously failed to do this, and Lebanese army control of the border is a questionable substitute. Israel has done a lot of damage to Hizbollah, however, so score a tactical victory here for Israel, even if it's still a strategic stalemate. But the Israel-Hizbollah conflict cannot be separated from the larger regional issue.

That issue is Iran's rising push for control of the region. The components of a counterstrategy are: dismantling or pushing out Hizbollah, isolating Iran's ally Syria, containing Iran and stopping its nuclear program, and preventing Lebanon from becoming this decade's Afghanistan or Sudan -- another ugly Jihadi-land paid for by a wealthy, reactionary sponsor swimming in oil money (Saudi Arabia in those cases, Iran now). Otherwise, Lebanon will become Tehran's western suburbs.

Of course, we can't duck Iran's major goal of getting nuclear weapons. This issue has conveniently and not accidentally vanished from people's attention during the Lebanese commotion. Iran's first use for such weapons will not be to attack Israel, but to intimidate and weaken existing Muslim governments in the region, push the US protective umbrella away from them, and get a hold of their oil revenues. If there are significant Shiite minorities present (like in Saudi Arabia's oil-rich eastern province), it's that much easier. In a world of abundant oil but heavy political control over a semi-monopolistic market and artificially elevated prices, that's the name of the game. (See here and here.) Iran will probably start with the oil-rich Shiites of Iraq, then move on to the Arabian Shiites. Coming from the reverse direction, Saddam tried to do just this in 1990 to Kuwait -- seize its oil fields and acquire a new stream of oil revenue. Saddam's attempt was justified on the fading appeal of pan-Arabism. Iran's will be based on some kind of Shiite caliphate claim.

Hey, maybe Ahmadinejad really is the Hidden Imam :^)

Strategypage gets it too: Israel has defeated (although not destroyed) Hizbollah, the diplomatic deal will probably self-destruct, but Hizbollah has won a real victory -- not over Israel, but by scaring Sunnis and Muslim governments, impressing them with the violent potential of a Shiite minority backed by Iran.

In my posting on Middle East lunacy, I suggested that Israel should offer to pay part of Lebanon's reconstruction costs. My suggestion has since been upstaged by Iran's generous offer of some of its $70/barrel oil money (see how oil $ twists the Middle East?), and it's unlikely to be accepted. But it should be out there anyway.

A friend wanted to know if I was suggesting reparations -- no, I wasn't. I was suggesting enlightened self-interest, a way for Israel to constructively stick its nose into the Lebanese tent and take advantage of the Sunni and Muslim elite fright of Iran and the Shiites.

And how about reparations for Israel?

And finally, not all is lost in Hollywood's narcissistic playpen: see the new L.A. Times ad about the Middle East from some serious star wattage.

LATER: Gadi Taub at TNR notes another aspect of Hamas and Hizbollah terrorism: they both operate from areas effectively not under the control of a sovereign government, and they both want Israel tied down as an occupier in Gaza and south Lebanon. Unilateral withdrawal has been a disaster for their strategy:

It's just that their use of the word "occupation" has a particular meaning. They're not referring to the West Bank or Gaza--they mean the whole of Palestine. Ending what we call the occupation is essential to Israel's long-term existence--the only way the Jewish state can survive in the face of new demographic realities and avoid unsustainable moral costs. Ending what they call the occupation means ending the state of Israel. Therefore, keeping Israel tied down in Gaza, the West Bank, and Lebanon is strategically rational if your goal is Israel's destruction.

He concludes, as I do, that it is in Israel's interest to stabilize and strengthen Lebanese sovereignty. (The case of Gaza and Hamas differs somewhat, but the same logic holds: sovereignty is the enemy of terrorism.) Read the whole thing here (requires subscription).

Middle East Lunacy, Part 457

I wanted to make this post more long-term in its view, but given its topicality, I thought it important to contribute my $0.02 to understanding it all.

Essentially, Hizbollah has taken Lebanon hostage and is now using it as a human shield. Lebanon suffered 15 years of sectarian civil war, 18 years of Israeli (partial) occupation, and 15 years of Syrian control. The Cedar Revolution of 2005 (the March 15th movement) gave many hope that it could make a full comeback. But Lebanon cannot be put back together or become a real country with an armed Hizbollah acting as an Iranian proxy. It's not only a state-within-a-state, but a mini-state apparently more powerful than its host. It's the Iranian Armed Forces West.

The governments currently complaining about Israel's disproportionate response will be singing a different tune when terrorist groups in, say, Russia or India can do what Hizbollah is now doing. (The Russian or Indian response to such attacks will also not be proportionate -- the Chechen war has been wildly disproportionate. But they also probably won't appear on CNN.) Many of the world's critics of Israel are still reading an old script connected to the Palestinians. What they don't realize yet is that Nasrallah and Hizbollah have, in a single stroke, succeeded not only in exporting a Shiite jihadism that might soon eclipse Sunni jihadism, but have also finished converting the Arab-Israeli conflict into a Muslim-Jewish conflict no longer connected to the Palestinians.

The apparent political payoff is that Hizbollah is staging a "coup" against the Lebanese government, by leveraging its fight against Israel to achieve what they couldn't achieve through internal Lebanese politics or Syrian domination -- that is, to reverse the Cedar Revolution. See here and here, as well as here. For more, listen to this discussion by a Lebanese Christian here (streaming WMV video). In this regard, my biases are essentially these.

The payoff for Iran is also great. A Hizbollah coup moves Iran closer to dominating an area stretching from western Afghanistan to the Mediterranean coast, in part through allies in Iraq, Syria, Lebanon -- the start of a new caliphate with messianic ("hidden imam") claims and a big blow to the current Western-style system of nation-states in the region. For a second time, Iran has diverted attention from its nuclear weapons program by instigating a crisis, just at the moment the G8 summit in Russia was to focus on that very issue. The first was last winter, when Iran led the way in engineering the staged provocations (the anti-Danish cartoon riots) in Europe, just at the moment when Denmark took the chair of the UN Security Council.

Many commentators are now arguing that Israel is losing against Hizbollah. It's too early to say that for sure. But it is clear that the Israeli policy of unilateral withdrawals has come to an end. The first such withdrawal (from Lebanon in 2000) helped precipitate the misnamed "Al-Aqsa intifada"; the second (from Gaza in 2005) helped lead to the Hamas electoral victory and start of rocket attacks from Gaza this past spring. Israel's goals for now are narrowly military. Olmert is clearly determined to avoid playing empire-builder in Lebanon as Sharon did 24 years ago. But that will eventually have to change. While the larger regional problem cannot be solved by Israel alone and international involvement is needed to put Lebanon back together, Israel is a regional power and needs to act as such, and not just militarily. The one good thing about all this is that what was once just Israel's problem, is now recognized as everyone else's problem as well. Arab governments are terrified that what they see in southern Lebanon is also their future. There is growing public recognition that jihadism is as big or bigger threat to Arab countries than to Israel or West. European governments should also be terrified, but they're not -- yet.

Another consequence is that isolating Iran will now be easier than you think -- they have overplayed their hand. Until now, they avoided doing anything really stupid (unlike Saddam or Milosevic), but they've clearly blown it. The stubborn Euro-myth that Hamas-Hizbollah jihadism was merely "resistance to occupation" has been exploded: Israel is gone from Gaza and was gone from Lebanon for six years. Clearly, Hizbollah and to a lesser extent Hamas are Iranian proxies, and this is a proxy war, not a war against occupation. Of course, that's always been true, but there has a widespread refusal to see this in Arab capitals and in Europe. This can no longer be sustained. The parallel need to isolate Syria, Iran's sidekick, is widely recognized in Arab capitals, but not appreciated in the West.

A final clear point is the need for Bush to re-engage politically in Middle East, something that is tentatively underway. By Bush reducing much of his foreign policy to the Iraq war, America is no longer as respected or feared as it once was in the Middle East, one of the many negative consequences of the Iraq invasion. Another was riling up Iran by toppling its neighboring regimes in Afghanistan and Iraq. Bush's times of maximum leverage in the Middle East were 2002 and early 2005, both periods of intense political engagement. Let's hope Bush is now free of the neoconservative fallacy of trying to achieve non-military ends with military means and that he understands that military means are effective only when used for military ends.

To add more opinion than analysis: Olmert does not want to repeat what Sharon did in the 1980s in Lebanon, a prolonged and massive ground war/occupation. Hence the air strikes without a large ground force. But Hizbollah has quite deliberately interlaced its rocket launchers in civilian areas (not even always Shiite areas, but Druze and Christian areas as well). Stopping the rockets needs ground attacks. To stop the rockets by air would require carpet bombing southern Lebanon, and even that would probably not work. Special forces raids can do this. But they can't accomplish the larger goal of disarming Hizbollah, or pushing it out of southern Lebanon, or allowing the Lebanese government to take control. Many Lebanese now support Hizbollah, because of the escalating civilian casualties. This could turn into a catastrophe for Lebanon and the end of Lebanon as an independent country, as well as another Iranian-backed jihadist triumph.

There is an alternative to a massive ground invasion, as Michael Totten has repeatedly explained: those Israeli bombs currently falling on southern Lebanon should instead be falling on Syria and Iran. The air strikes on southern Lebanon should stop. Israel should explicitly link attacks on Syria and Iran with the international and Middle Eastern effort to isolate both countries. The best offense is strategic, not getting bogged down in a futile and politically costly fight against Hizbollah, a diversionary trap in the end. Hit their sponsors instead, and hit them hard. The timing is obviously critical but should not obscure the need.

Israel should not just offer, but insist, publicly, that it be involved with Lebanon's reconstruction, including paying some of the costs. This aid should be conditional on disarming Hizbollah and on Lebanese government control of the border.

(Posted on the eve of Tisha B'Av 5766 and the 92nd anniversary of the start of World War One.)