Nir Rosen has an amazing report in The National from a Sunni town in Lebanon where gunmen block the Beirut-Damascus road and send suicide bombers to blow up Shiites in Iraq:
key opponent to Iran, Saddam Hussein – and Hezbollah’s July 2006 war
with Israel, many analysts suggested a “Shiite revival” was underway.
But as the Lebanese political scientist Amer Mohsen told me, it would
be more accurate to talk of a general resurgence of sectarian
identities across the Middle East: “There is a Shiite revival, a Sunni
revival, a Druze revival, an Alawite revival and a Kurdish revival –
all happening simultaneously.”
A couple comments. Neoconservatives are at heart an element of American identity politics. They arose in some measure out of sociological resentment, as Jacob Heilbrunn demonstrated, and as I knew in my Jewish-son-of-a-CCNY grad bones, and they think in very sectarian terms. It's fascinating that their plans for the Middle East, which included cementing the Jewish occupation of Arab lands in Palestine by engineering an American occupation of Arab lands in Iraq, have helped uncap sectarian fervor across the region. Yes, it was all there, and people are responsible for their own actions, and Lebanon lacks any cohesion as a society, thanks in part to invasions from its two neighbors. But America has helped. The warriors that Rosen meets often have American grenades and pistols that were marketed in Baghdad. Secondly, there is a lot of talk about suicide terrorism by Sunnis in this piece, the glory of it, and I'm reminded that Robert Pape's realist model for suicide terrorism actually held in Iraq: it was a tool used by Sunnis against the Shiite majority. There was a religious difference and a sense of political dispossession, as he said there must be, in Dying to Win.
An issue that arises from this piece is, How long can Israel continue to tamp down the tremendous sectarian fervor within its amalgamated borders? Rosen again:
confrontation with Israel but contemptuous of its failure to fight
beyond Lebanon’s borders. “Hizbollah protects the Jewish border with
orders from the Syrian regime,” he said. The goal of Hizbollah’s
“takeover” of Beirut was to weaken Sunnis in the Arab world, he argued.
So sectarianism is a disease rushing throughout the Middle East, enabled by the U.S. Somehow it horrifies the American public more, as westerners, to see suicide terrorism in a "western" society, Israel. But Israel is partaking of the same "us-ness" madness that everyone else in the Middle East is partaking of, in its case Zionism, privileging Jews, oppressing Arabs. This is further argument for why Americans horrified by the neocon takeover must elect Obama, a man who makes no reference to his race except in the most allusive terms and who really doesn't think in those terms, notwithstanding the youthful explorations so beautifully recorded in his first book; his rise will be a great signal to the world of the relaxation of identity politics. And maybe it can help Israel to be a country of its citizens. And Lebanon and Iraq too…
P.S. There is also a dramatic/witty piece in the National from Suzy Hansen, about the connections in Istanbul between the headscarf, feminine honor, and a neighborhood's honor.
