Damascus

Senator Reid just now said a smart thing on the floor of the Senate: the way out of the Iraq mess involves talking to Syria. "Even talking to Syria." The grieving David Grossman told Israel the same thing last week. And Americans for Peace Now reports that the intelligence head of the Israel Defense Forces has made the same recommendation to the Israeli Prime Minister. New Defsec Robert Gates is sure to Amen these statements.

The world is changing! The debacles in Iraq and Lebanon have left all roads going in one direction, Damascus.

BEIRUT, Lebanon, Aug.  read more »

In a great piece in the Times last week, Neil MacFarquhar reported from Damascus that the disastrous Iraq war, chased by Israel's Lebanon war, has set back the cause of reform in the Arab world. An Arab moderate is afraid to say good things about the U.S. now without fear of a beating. While the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt has shot to political prominence thanks to a U.S. policy that looks to them like destroying the Arab world to save it.

The reformers point to a "taproot" for Muslim extremism:

Reformers invariably add that a credible effort to solve the issue of Arab land occupied by Israel, which they believe is the taproot of extremism, does not even seem to be on Washington's radar.

The taproot of extremism. It was amazing to watch the Sunday talk shows yesterday in the wake of the London arrests and hear the usual blather about Why they hate us?—lack of opportunity in the Arab world, dictatorship, etc.—and not hear one voice expressing the concerns of our friends in the Arab world. Though once, on Meet the Press, Gov. Tom Kean did mention our support of Israel. This question has now been with us for five years.

You get far more honest discussion about this from the Israel Policy Forum, whose leaders wrote into the Times to acknowledge that the Israeli occupation was indeed the "taproot" of extremism, and to insist that withdrawing from the West Bank is the prime business of the Olmert government.

The inability of the mainstream media to examine the apartheid conditions in the West Bank, and the degree to which these conditions are fueling Arab rage across the region, is further proof, if anyone needs it, of the strength of the Israel lobby in this country. Americans are wed, forcibly, to an ideal of Israel as an enlightened democracy. They are almost never shown the militarized, racist, religious zealots who have carved up Arab land in the name of their alliance with us, the United States.

And no, that's not the only reason they hate us. But it's a big one. How long can we live in denial?

JERUSALEM, Israel, Aug.  read more »

If you ever needed a reminder of how important the realist intellectuals' spring assault on the Israel lobby is, today's Times bore it out. Its polls show that most Americans feel that Israel's indiscriminate destruction in Lebanon will lead to a wider war, and that we don't have a dog in that fight and shouldn't get involved. "Support for the president's staunch backing of Israel goes only so far..." intones the Times: 39 percent say they approve it, but 40 percent say we should be neutral on its latest conflict.

We are all realists now... Most of us anyway.

The poll underscores what the prescient David Brooks meant but refused to say openly some weeks back when he spoke in code about isolationist populists versus interventionist "elites" in foreign policy. Translation: The interventionist elites side with Israel all the way to the destruction of two Arab capitals, and Damascus and Tehran while we're at it. The isolationist populists are the American majority, burned by neocon delusions about Iraq, wary of getting involved in this unending cycle of violence that will only see an end when we exercise our power as the offshore balancer.

Brooks was talking in code because the politics of this are so frightening to the Brooks-Beinart elite. When you have an American groundswell saying one thing—Hizbullah is crazy, but so is Israel—and neither party representing those views, a Ross Perot could emerge, or some other demagogue. Who will respond to this feeling politically? Not the mainline Democrats. They demonstrated the power of the Israel lobby when they sandbagged Iraqi Prime Minister al-Maliki for criticizing Israeli "aggression" in Lebanon. While in Connecticut Ned Lamont is afraid to say a word against our Israel policy, till August 9 anyway.

Here's one flicker of light. Last night on Hardball, Republican strategist Ed Rogers sounded the majority position when he called the Israel-Lebanon fighting a "sideshow" that can "hurt America's interest in Iraq." The Democrats should never have confronted al-Maliki over his anti-Israel statements; they were acting "not in America's interest."

The invocation of an American interest that is not Israel's, by a political strategist—holy moly. If you can run against the gun lobby, why not the Israel lobby? I can't wait for October. Then maybe some gutty congressional aspirants will run on that idea, and find a movement behind them.

DAMASCUS, Syria, July 18—The road to Damascus was bombed again early this morning, the seventh day  read more »

DAMASCUS, Syria, July 18—The road to Damascus was bombed again early this morning, the seventh  read more »

When I went to Syria in January (to visit my wife's cousin who teaches in Damascus), I signed a visa application on which I had to check a box saying that I had never been to "Occupied Palestine." I'd never been to Israel; I checked the box. I didn't feel good about it.

Just now an angry Ambassador Ja'afari of Syria came out of the U.N. Security Council and condemned the Israeli occupation of Palestine that has gone on for "four decades." He was obviously referring to the occupation of the West Bank. I believe that this is an indication of Arab attitudes: that they are ready to accept the existence of Israel within the '67 borders. Even Hamas does, per the prisoners' proposal. Don't such signs relieve the "existential" fears?

Scott McConnell, editor of The American Conservative (and the former editorial page editor of the New York Post who abandoned neoconservatism in part because of the neocon disdain for "people of color"), is recently returned from a trip to the Mideast sponsored by Churches for Middle East Peace, a group dedicated to getting mainstream Christians involved in these issues.

McConnell found Damascus just as pleasurable as I found it a few months back. He met President Assad and judged him to be "wonkish" and sincere, looking to some day reap the rewards of peace with Israel, trying to modernize his country in the face of Islamicism. Then at the U.S. Embassy, McConnell relates the following encounter, very layered:

We spent part of an afternoon at the American ambassador's residence, hearing our diplomats explain how they are keeping economic and political pressure on the Assad regime and about Syria's lack of progress towards real reform. Off the record, around a table of drinks and snacks, the tone softened. They all loved being stationed in Damascus and were delighted with their encounters with unofficial Syria. I told one diplomat that the evening before we had attended a concert at the city's largest Greek Orthodox church, hearing men's, women's, and children's choirs perform religious and folk songs. It was a large and formal event, a milestone in the Damascene Christian calendar. Watching the young choir boys fussing shyly with their uniforms or their mothers coddling younger brothers and sisters or gathering the kids together after the event, one could easily imagine this as a pre-Easter break convocation at Convent of the Sacred Heart in New York or any large parochial school in the Western world. I told the diplomat that there are many in the corridors of power in Bush's Washington who want nothing more than to smash the Syrian regime in the service of the "global democratic revolution" or whatever is the slogan of the moment at the American Enterprise Institute, and this smashing would have incalculably tragic consequences for the community whose celebration we had witnessed the night before. He nodded with a look of weary resignation.

More evidence that the neocon moment is over.

David Schenker has lately left his post as "the Syria, Lebanon, Jordan, and Palestinian affairs adviser in the office of the secretary of defense" (to become—of course—a senior fellow in Arab politics for the Washington Institute for Near East Policy). Penning an article in the Weekly Standard, Schenker now complains at length about his erstwhile bosses' policy re Syria, and concludes:

Despite the administration's rhetorical campaign against Syria, Washington is in no rush to up the ante with Damascus.

George Ajjan, a Republican politician in New Jersey and a Syrian-American, first blogged this story. His interpretation:

Schenker's article basically admits to the neo-cons' political base: Look guys, we've bitten off more than we can chew, and sorry, but our plan to change the whole Middle East is just not realistic. Some of his colleagues will be furious at such a revelation. This is a proto-concession speech. Well, the neo-con plot was never realistic to begin with. As the Bush Administration's policies, shaped by this misguided vision, continue to play out in the Middle East, we should definitely expect more such frustration expressed, and continued infighting from within the neo-con ranks.

A few months ago I went to Syria as a tourist, to visit my wife's cousin, who is teaching in Damascus. I had a very good time (in stark contrast to an unpleasant trip to Morocco) and since then I've been trying to sort out my experience. What have I to say about that most controversial of matters—the Arab world, and an Arab dictatorship—based on my personal experience as a tourist? What does my truly enjoyable trip mean, compared, say to the neoconservative view that Syria is evil (put forth by Paul Berman in Terror and Liberalism, and by David Frum and Richard Perle in An End to Evil)?

Here's what I'm going to do. I'm going to post an entry now on my impressions of Syria. Then I'm going to post an entry in which I talk to Josh Landis, a professor at Oklahoma U. who is on my side (the left, though more centrist than me) and one of the leading experts on Syria, having lived there and married a Syrian.  read more »

So. My impressions:

I was checking out the Christian Science Monitor's remarkable series of intimate photographs of Jill Carroll's reunion with her parents, hugging her father, falling over in her mother's lap, when I felt the tears falling on my keyboard. http://www.csmonitor.com/slideshows/2006/homecoming2/index.html

Why so stirring? Well, you wouldn't know it from the mainstream media, but Jill Carroll has become a kind of symbol over the last few weeks of a different American response to the world. Carroll went to the Mid East in 2002, in the wake of the 9/11 attacks, to try and understand that part of the world. She worked for the Jordan Times (which called her "Our Jill" after she was kidnaped), and she started learning Arabic.

To Jill Carroll, these people weren't Other. It's interesting to consider that if neoconservatism and the idea of a clash of civilizations have the greatest hold on the minds of graying men, young women are most immune to that kind of talk. Jill Carroll's not alone. Marla Ruzicka, the human rights worker killed by an IED in Iraq; Rachel Corrie, the protester killed by Israelis in Gaza in 2003; and my wife's cousin Betsy O'Neil, who teaches in Damascus—right there you have four young American women called to that part of the world in a spirit of outreach. They are trying to heal the western-Arab divide.

Jill Carroll's work had that character: she was trying to soften the talk about a clash of civilizations by making that world more understandable to us. (Yes, I do think there's a clash of civilizations, but that topic can wait). And this is what so many Iraqis and Muslims said when she was kidnaped, in appealing for her release. Or said in thousands of emails to the Monitor. Her release is thus a vindication of that principle, that different cultures can come to an understanding. And therefore joyful to so many of us, when every other answer people come up with in Iraq is brutalized.

It seems to me a sign of the spiritual evolution of the Carroll family, and the Monitor, that they made as much of Jill Carroll's reunion public as they did in the remarkable series of photos. The family (and paper) were indicating through this open act that the gift of Carroll's return was one to be shared with everyone who is looking for a better solution to the clash of civilizations than occupation and indiscriminate violence.