Faithful Global Review reader david w. asked for analysis of the multiplying crises in the Middle East. Where does one even begin?
In
Israel, politics is quiet. This is not normal.
Shimon Peres just won a barely-contested parliamentary election as president. Peres was the Labor candidate for President in 2000, but a last-minute swing by the religious Shas pulled the rug from beneath him. This time, as candidate of the ruling center-right party, Kadima, he won going away.
Israel's politics remains in a state of centripetal flux. Whither the war- and peace-mongers of yesteryear? The loud goals of peaceniks and nationalists alike have been gathering dust lately; ten - even five - years ago they were flaunted constantly. Now
Palestine has taken over. Paradoxically, its capacity for self-determination has come because Palestine has become utterly ungovernable.
The last strands of the strained relationship between Israel and Palestine have snapped in recent weeks as the Palestinian unity government descended into civil war. (Elected Hamas brought in loser Fatah to be the "good cop"; Israel didn't buy it.)
Hamas is winning the civil war.
Gaza is almost completely under Hamas control, and Fatah fighters have been executed in the streets where captured. President Mahmoud Abbas (Fatah) is still in Gaza, and his party is telling him to dissolve the government so that he can rule by decree. What authority he has left is an open question.
One possible military result is that Hamas could rule Gaza and Fatah the West Bank.
Al-Jazeera reports that Hamas operatives are being held by Fatah men in several West Bank towns. Meanwhile,
Egypt is trying to broker a peace to avert a refugee wave into Sinai.
On another front, Egypt is attempting to keep its southern neighbor,
Sudan, stable. That means tacitly supporting the Khartoum government against the Darfur rebels and the international community. From Egypt's perspective, a genocide in Darfur is unpleasant but localized (and far away). The overthrow of unified Sudan (which has been a tenuous state since its inception) could send Egypt's southern border into chaos.
In Khartoum, as
Global Review discussed Tuesday, the Islamist government is yielding to
U.S. pressure on allowing a UN force to protect civilians in Darfur. The U.S. can only exert so much pressure though: too much will spark a commercial conflict with
China and would break down the
spy cooperation the U.S. receives from Sudan in
Iraq. Apparently, the Sudanese
Mukhabarat are lending officers to the CIA, since they can glide into Al-Qaeda circles as an American never could.
And we need those spies in Iraq. Not only are American agents handicapped, but the Iraqi intelligence services have
broken into feuding factions, writes David Ignatius. The sectarian violence, which
has spiked since
yesterday's bombing of the Askariya shrine in Samarra, pervades every aspect of the government. Ignatius' article notes that one of the spy services is U.S.-backed, the other Iranian backed and wholly Shiite. It is becoming harder and harder to imagine a scenario under which the Shia, Sunna, and Kurds agree to share power in a stable (let alone democratic) Iraq. Meanwhile, it becomes more apparent that - among others - the conflict between the U.S. and
Iran is being played out on Iraqi streets.
Iran, of course, is moving forward with its plans for nuclearization and working overtime to insert a friendly government in Iraq. As U.S. political punch has waned in the region, Iran has become bold,
supplying the Taliban with weapons. They have no bonds of love with the super-Sunni Taliban, so the move signals an increasing view of the U.S. as their primary enemy and little faith in the staying power of the central Afghan government.
Afghanistan and
Pakistan continue to work with the U.S., but both seem deeply susceptible to fundamentalist Sunni revolutions. Combined with
Saudi Arabia's push for nuclear energy, Iran has some hard decisions to make. Do they support the Sunni militants, on the same logic that the U.S. used in the 1980's? Or does the proliferation of Sunni revolutionary movements pose a greater threat in the long run?
One such movement is the Fatah al-Islam militia in
Lebanon. In the byzantine politics of the Middle East's most diverse state, it's hard to know where Iran - through its proxy Hezbollah - stands on the three-week-old
Cold River Refugee Camp battle (Cold River is English for Naher al-Bared). While no political faction is coming out in favor of the militia, Hezbollah may be looking to score points against Fouad Siniora's government on other fronts.
Zvi Bar'el has deep analysis on the politics of Cold River in Ha'aretz:
As in every such camp, its quarters are split according to the groups that control them: one quarter for Hamas and one for Fatah, a street for the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine and a neighborhood for left-wing organizations or radical Islamic groups. All of them are armed to the teeth...
The actions of these splinter groups are also not desirable from Hezbollah's perspective. That's because as soon as the Lebanese Army shows it is capable of attacking a small Palestinian organization it wants to disarm, there are some who call for the army to take the opportunity to disarm Hezbollah, too.
It cannot be lost on Lebanese that this is their national, non-sectarian army's first victory. Ever. For 15 years, popular wisdom is that Hezbollah had the strongest military in Lebanon, and Syria and Israel could annihilate anything they wanted. But Israel's failure to crush Hezbollah last summer and
Syria's increasing isolation have called the balance of power into question.
With continued assassinations of anti-Syrian politicians - the latest was Sunni
Walid Eido - Lebanon gets angrier and slumps closer to open conflict with Syria and Hezbollah. The UN is trying to exert pressure on Syria to investigate (and stop) the assassinations, but with Syria's keystone position separating the Iraq and Palestine civil wars the international community is unwilling to push hard.
Does anybody still believe the quick-fix prescriptions of the 20th century?
