Post by Bozur on Mar 30, 2008 9:57:39 GMT -5
Between West and East
Spencer Platt/Getty Images
Checking out the destruction in southern Beirut, August 2006.
By MICHAEL J. TOTTEN
Published: March 30, 2008
First-time visitors to Lebanon are often startled at how different the country seems from the rest of the Arab world. Spectacular snow-capped mountains rise sheer from the shores of the Mediterranean. Freewheeling Beirut, where almost everything short of murder and rape is allowed, feels more like Hong Kong or Amsterdam than dreary Damascus or Cairo. Elegant women, Muslim as well as Christian, dress as stylishly as their counterparts in Milan and Manhattan. Plastic surgeons are as ubiquitous as decadent and erotically charged nightclubs. Democracy isn’t pushed on the Lebanese by diplomats or foreign soldiers — it’s taught in schools, and has been for more than a half-century.
But Lebanon is also where Palestinian guerrillas, living in squalid camps, fought a hot war with the national army last year. Bullet-pocked and mortar-shattered towers stand as gruesome reminders that history continues to be made in Beirut, that the Paris of the Middle East moonlights as the Baghdad of the Levant. “Until Iraq took a share of the title in 2003,” Sandra Mackey writes in “Mirror of the Arab World: Lebanon in Conflict,” “the most tormented of all Arab countries was Lebanon.”
Though far and away the most liberal, democratic and sophisticated of Arabic-speaking countries, Lebanon, as Mackey convincingly shows, still hasn’t managed to overcome the Arab world’s troubles. Identity is rooted in family, clan, sect and ideology more than in the nation. The weak central government can’t administer or police its territory. Meddlesome foreigners use the country for proxy wars, at times occupying swaths of its land with their own soldiers. Borders are only vaguely defined in some places, and everywhere else were drawn up by Western imperialists in collaboration with local clients. Conflict between Shiite and Sunni Muslims, and between Muslims and Christians, has plunged Lebanon into civil war and may do so again. Hezbollah’s radical Islamist militia administers its own area and is better armed and trained than the national army. In 2006 Lebanon was, yet again, a front line in the intractable Arab-Israeli conflict.
“Mirror of the Arab World” is really two books in one. Mackey’s narrative deftly weaves Lebanon’s tragic history with that of the Arab Middle East as a whole. The author of books on Iraq, Iran and Saudi Arabia, Mackey follows Yasir Arafat’s Palestine Liberation Organization from its insurgency against King Hussein in Jordan, through its formation of a state-within-a-state in Lebanon to its exile at the hands of Israeli soldiers. She traces the arc of rising Shiite political power as it developed from Iran’s Islamic Republic and Saddam Hussein’s defeat in Iraq to the emergence of Hezbollah’s protostate in south Lebanon. Rather than look at Iraq as an echo of Vietnam, she finds a closer parallel in the ferocious civil war that pitted sect against sect and local against foreigner in Lebanon during the 1970s and 1980s.
Mackey performs the tricky balancing act of demonstrating that Lebanon is unique yet somehow still reflective of all Arab countries. “The world of the Arabs is no longer a mysterious, romanticized region lying somewhere between Europe and Asia,” she writes. “It is here. It is now. And it is difficult.” Lebanon is especially difficult.
Beirut has long been considered a gateway between the West and the East. It is also a doorway to understanding, because to know Lebanon is to know the Arabs. “Mirror of the Arab World” is an expert depiction of both.
Michael J. Totten is an independent foreign correspondent specializing in the Middle East. He is a former resident of Beirut.
www.nytimes.com/
Spencer Platt/Getty Images
Checking out the destruction in southern Beirut, August 2006.
By MICHAEL J. TOTTEN
Published: March 30, 2008
First-time visitors to Lebanon are often startled at how different the country seems from the rest of the Arab world. Spectacular snow-capped mountains rise sheer from the shores of the Mediterranean. Freewheeling Beirut, where almost everything short of murder and rape is allowed, feels more like Hong Kong or Amsterdam than dreary Damascus or Cairo. Elegant women, Muslim as well as Christian, dress as stylishly as their counterparts in Milan and Manhattan. Plastic surgeons are as ubiquitous as decadent and erotically charged nightclubs. Democracy isn’t pushed on the Lebanese by diplomats or foreign soldiers — it’s taught in schools, and has been for more than a half-century.
But Lebanon is also where Palestinian guerrillas, living in squalid camps, fought a hot war with the national army last year. Bullet-pocked and mortar-shattered towers stand as gruesome reminders that history continues to be made in Beirut, that the Paris of the Middle East moonlights as the Baghdad of the Levant. “Until Iraq took a share of the title in 2003,” Sandra Mackey writes in “Mirror of the Arab World: Lebanon in Conflict,” “the most tormented of all Arab countries was Lebanon.”
Though far and away the most liberal, democratic and sophisticated of Arabic-speaking countries, Lebanon, as Mackey convincingly shows, still hasn’t managed to overcome the Arab world’s troubles. Identity is rooted in family, clan, sect and ideology more than in the nation. The weak central government can’t administer or police its territory. Meddlesome foreigners use the country for proxy wars, at times occupying swaths of its land with their own soldiers. Borders are only vaguely defined in some places, and everywhere else were drawn up by Western imperialists in collaboration with local clients. Conflict between Shiite and Sunni Muslims, and between Muslims and Christians, has plunged Lebanon into civil war and may do so again. Hezbollah’s radical Islamist militia administers its own area and is better armed and trained than the national army. In 2006 Lebanon was, yet again, a front line in the intractable Arab-Israeli conflict.
“Mirror of the Arab World” is really two books in one. Mackey’s narrative deftly weaves Lebanon’s tragic history with that of the Arab Middle East as a whole. The author of books on Iraq, Iran and Saudi Arabia, Mackey follows Yasir Arafat’s Palestine Liberation Organization from its insurgency against King Hussein in Jordan, through its formation of a state-within-a-state in Lebanon to its exile at the hands of Israeli soldiers. She traces the arc of rising Shiite political power as it developed from Iran’s Islamic Republic and Saddam Hussein’s defeat in Iraq to the emergence of Hezbollah’s protostate in south Lebanon. Rather than look at Iraq as an echo of Vietnam, she finds a closer parallel in the ferocious civil war that pitted sect against sect and local against foreigner in Lebanon during the 1970s and 1980s.
Mackey performs the tricky balancing act of demonstrating that Lebanon is unique yet somehow still reflective of all Arab countries. “The world of the Arabs is no longer a mysterious, romanticized region lying somewhere between Europe and Asia,” she writes. “It is here. It is now. And it is difficult.” Lebanon is especially difficult.
Beirut has long been considered a gateway between the West and the East. It is also a doorway to understanding, because to know Lebanon is to know the Arabs. “Mirror of the Arab World” is an expert depiction of both.
Michael J. Totten is an independent foreign correspondent specializing in the Middle East. He is a former resident of Beirut.
www.nytimes.com/
