COMMENT Coups and counter-coups
By Kaveh L Afrasiabi
Back from the brink, fragile Lebanon can breathe again, thanks to the timely
intervention of the Arab League which, no matter how divided and polarized,
managed to pull off a big one by convincing the Lebanese government to rescind
its controversial decisions that had triggered the latest crisis. This was the
removal of the head of Beirut Airport and an assault on a nerve center of the
Hezbollah-led resistance, its communication network.
So, as the guns begin to fall silent in Beirut, Tripoli and elsewhere in
Lebanon and fractious Lebanon and the outside world reflect on what transpired
this past several days on the eve of President George W Bush's Middle East
trip, it has become fairly obvious that the Saudi Arabia accusation of an
Iran-inspired Hezbollah
"coup" is a total misnomer. Indeed, the more apt term is a "government coup and
Hezbollah's successful counter-coup".
This does not sit well with pro-Israel pundits in the US, such as Thomas
Friedman, who in his latest commentary titled "New Cold War" in the New York
Times, gives the following mischaracterization:
The outrage of the week
is the Iranian-Syrian-Hezbollah attempt to take over Lebanon. Hezbollah thugs
pushed into Sunni neighborhoods in west Beirut, focusing particular attention
on crushing progressive news outlets like Future TV, so Hezbollah's propaganda
machine could dominate the airwaves. The Shi'ite militia Hezbollah emerged
supposedly to protect Lebanon from Israel. Having done that, it has now turned
around and sold Lebanon to Syria and Iran.
No mention is made
of Hezbollah's allies, such as Amal or the Free Patriotic Movement led by
former prime minister Michel Aoun, a leading foe of current Prime Minister
Fouad Siniora. Rather, the Cold War reductionism leads people to the Manichean,
good guy, bad guy, bifurcation where the "ruthless" Iranians are supposedly
winning against the "dumb" America and its "feckless" Sunni Arab allies.
Further, a look at the behavior of Arab League delegates in Beirut this week
makes it evident that the neat division of "moderates" versus "radicals" simply
does not wash. Qatar and Algeria threw their weight behind Syria and openly
questioned Saudi Arabia's anti-Iran rush to judgment. Saudi Arabia will now
either temper its Washington-style anti-Hezbollah rhetoric or it will find
itself increasingly isolated in the Arab world, including among its brethren in
the Gulf Cooperation Council, who recognize the Saudi error of prioritizing its
criticisms of Hezbollah over its stance on Israel.
It is also overlooked that until recently, Saudi Arabia, Iran and France
engaged in a collaborative effort over Lebanon, which needs to be resuscitated
now irrespective of their differences. Iran has just submitted its vision of
security cooperation to resolve regional and global crises, and the West would
be remiss to ignore Tehran's commitments and not to ask for actions to back its
words.
The use of "new cold war" terminology is a verbal surrogate, or rather
subterfuge, for Israel to befriend conservative Arab states with respect to the
regional strategic environment, thus bypassing the core issue of Palestinian
rights. But, again, it is conveniently overlooked that about 60 years of
Arab-Israeli cold war has been punctuated with periodic hot wars.
One can't deny that there is a burgeoning US-Iran power game in the Middle
East, but in light of the sheer size of shared or parallel interests between
them - in Iraq, in Afghanistan against Taliban, al-Qaeda, energy insecurity -
the appellation "cold war" tends to obfuscate the complex, mixed-motive games
of strategy between the two sides, compared with the relatively straightforward
superpower rivalry during the Cold War.
So if the "new cold war" is not exactly a replica of the old Cold War, then by
definition the transition out of it, or away from it, looks different as well.
For one thing, it could mean exploring and finding new points of coinciding
interests, for example in Iraq, through meaningful security dialogue, which is
a lot more promising than a simple case of "confidence-building" measures
Cold-War-style.
And co-management of regional crises, by the US and Iran, is not an
impossibility, even though a minor "paradigm change" with respect to the US's
hegemonic global management would be necessary to make this happen.
Here, the US can actually draw a precious lesson from its mini-debacle in
Lebanon: blunting and suppressing Iran's "proxy" is not an effective ploy,
particularly as it militates against the country's internal balance of forces -
that are shaped in part by external influences.
Hezbollah's successful "counter-coup" accomplished its principal goal of
defeating a concerted effort to deplete its capability and its leadership (with
reports of failed plots against Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah in the past
weeks), and to undermine its credibility. This was to be done by stigmatizing
it as an Iranian puppet pure and simple. Capability and credibility are linked,
however, and the ferocity of US pundits' Hezbollah-bashing is only indicative
of their hidden anger and frustration at the coup that failed.
Kaveh L Afrasiabi, PhD, is the author of After Khomeini: New
Directions in Iran's Foreign Policy (Westview Press) and co-author of
"Negotiating Iran's Nuclear Populism", Brown Journal of World Affairs, Volume
XII, Issue 2, Summer 2005, with Mustafa Kibaroglu. He also wrote "Keeping
Iran's nuclear potential latent", Harvard International Review, and is author
of
Iran's Nuclear Program: Debating Facts Versus Fiction.
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