Some years ago, I owned a beagle named Leon. A
handsome, lemon-colored dog,
Leon had a terrific nose. Turn him and his brother
Otis loose in a thicket, and if those
boys didn’t chase a rabbit out, then no rabbits
lived there. Alas, Leon also did a lot
of "coldtrailing," baying down scent lines so
old that the rabbits which left them
probably existed only in the form of coyote scat.
Other dogs knew when Leon was
bluffing, but he could drive you nuts babbling
about nothing. My hunting buddies
nicknamed him "The Journalist." I’ve started
calling my current pack "The Pundits."
See, they’ve developed this habit of accompanying
distant police sirens with group
howl-ins. Except when they get tuned up around
5 a.m., it’s pretty funny to watch.
Rather like the savants on "Meet the Press" or
"Reliable Sources," they stand in a
circle hooting and eyeballing each other with
their noses pointed at the sky. Even my
wife’s basset hound joins the chorus. The only
remedy is spraying them with the
garden hose.
I wish Washington hounds were so easily discouraged.
Recently, the D. C. pundits
started baying about George W. Bush’s brilliant
success bringing "democracy" to the
Middle East. "Lately even the harshest critics
of President Bush have been forced to
admit: Maybe he’s right about freedom’s march
around the globe," anchorman Brian
Williams announced on NBC Nightly News. "What
if we are watching an example of
presidential leadership that will be taught in
America’s schools for generations to come?
It’s an idea gaining more currency."
Next came Andrea (Mrs. Alan Greenspan) Mitchell,
who spoke of "a historic turning
point, like the fall of the Berlin Wall." The
analogy first appeared in David Ignatius’
Washington Post column. It was attributed to
Walid Jumblatt, a Lebanese Druze leader
who’d had his U.S. visa revoked in 2003 after
regretting that Paul Wolfowitz, whom he
called a "microbe," had survived a Baghdad rocket
attack. Dick Cheney echoed him on
right-wing radio. It’s an officially approved
White House theme.
How sincere was Jumblatt? Let me put it this way:
I have Lebanese-born relatives by marriage.
(Christians, if it matters, which in Lebanon
it sure does.) Their default mode for analyzing
Middle Eastern politics is to assume that nothing
is what it seems and nobody’s motives
are what they say. What really matters is which
tribes/clans/religious sects/families are making
alliances with which others for the purpose of
screwing mutual enemies. They view other
ways of looking at the world as childish.
Syria entered Lebanon in 1976 at U.S. invitation
to quell a nasty civil war among very
roughly the same factions now demonstrating.
It nevertheless continued for another decade,
all but destroying Beirut, one of the world’s
great cities. There was a subsequent Israeli
invasion and withdrawal due to punishing losses
inflicted by Hezbollah, the Shiite militia
partly sponsored by Syria and Iran. With the
Israelis gone, many Lebanese, notably
Christians, Sunni and Druze, want the Syrians
out, too. The Shia, about 40 percent of
the population, want them to stay.
But what set off the current wave of demonstration
and counter-demonstration wasn’t
the U.S.-sponsored election in Iraq. (The Lebanese
have been having parliamentary
elections since the 1940s.) It was the assassination
of former Prime Minister Rafik Hariri,
blamed without evidence on Syria (although some
suspect Israel).
The idea of a U.S. president denouncing foreign
invaders no doubt strikes most Lebanese
as faintly hilarious. Will Bush now leave Iraq?
Demand that Israel quit putting fences around
Arab land in the West Bank? Give the Golan Heights
back to Syria? For now, though,
praising Bush might help drive the Syrians out.
Period.
Then there’s Palestine. Let’s pray that Mahmoud
Abbas, the recently elected prime minister,
can help moderates prevail. But let’s recall
that the election happened simply because Yasser
Arafat died. Arafat was elected, too. Should
Israel use this historic opening to tighten its grip
on East Jerusalem and expand West Bank settlements,
the current mood cannot last.
Egypt? Please.
Hosni Mubarak says he’ll let government-approved
candidates run against him. That’s
exactlyhow the ayatollahs run Iran. Until joining
the recent pro-Bush howl-in, pundits like
The Washington Post’s Charles Krauthammer justified
supporting Middle Eastern dictators
because "[d] emocracy is not a suicide pact."
Unlike Washington pundits, few in Beirut or
Cairo failed to notice that the Iraqi elections
were held under martial law enforced by a foreign
invader, with anonymous candidates and 42 percent
of the electorate boycotting. Nor that the
winners were Shiite religious parties answerable
to Grand Ayatollah Ali Sistani, the Iranian-born
cleric who basically forced Bush to hold the
elections. So far, the anti-U.S. insurrection shows
no signs of abating. Iraqis have been unable
to form a government. Maybe after they do, pundits
can quit baying at White House sirens and begin
to assess what the Bush doctrine actually means.
–—Free-lance columnist Gene Lyons is a Little Rock author and recipient
of the National Magazine Award.