THE NEAR WEST

Now featuring idioms straight from Damascus.

يطعمه الحج و الناس راجعة

Rough translation: “He wants to go on hajj and everyone’s returning.”

Appropriate for occasions when the moment has long passed. 

Dedicated to Kofi Annan.

My American Mohkhabarat Moment

On the metro back from work on Friday, I was sitting in the first seat facing the end of the car. I could see through the windows into the next car and I gradually noticed everyone’s attention being drawn to the side, out of my line of vision. Eventually two teenagers lurched into view, getting in each others’ faces and clearly talking loudly, even though I couldn’t hear anything. 

After a moment they were out of sight again, mostly, except a glimpse I caught when one reached back to take a swing at the other. I DID see the collective “oh shit!” of everyone facing me, though. All this happened in between Columbia Heights and Petworth. When I got out, two police officers were already on the platform and stepped into the car.

How the hell were they there already? I never see cops in the metro. I kept looking back, debating asking other passengers, and finally turned to head to the escalator. As I was walking, an older man came up next to me and said, “it’s amazing what a phone call can do.” I thought he meant generally speaking, and said, “I was wondering how quickly that happened!…” and trailed off when he flashed a badge at me. I said, “Oh. That’s how that happened.” He laughed and drawled, “sometimes the secret service aren’t so secret.” I laughed too. As I walked away I took a better look at him. Mid 50s, shorter than me, balding, dark pants, leather jacket…those mukhabarat, they dress the same everywhere. 

Talking about Syria

Political posts are not something I write. I had a discussion today about how reading these pieces going around and around about whatever the day’s topic is just feels like a waste of time. And even having lived in Syria for the first third of the uprising and having followed it semi-obsessively through friends and a handful of interviews and the internet since then, I can hardly give a nuanced reading of the situation. But as people talk more and more about what should be the “something” that must be done in Syria, I feel a personal opinion coming on.

I read “Night Draws Near” this week after Anthony Shadid died, which covers the first two years of the Iraq war and occupation. I read another book about the early days of the Iraq war right when I returned from Damascus as well and it kept striking me how much I felt like I was reading about Syria. At the time I was mostly comparing Qamariyeh with Mutanabbi, but that’s as good a metaphorical leap as any to start an opinion piece. Politically, the two countries have many differences, starting with the difference between an invasion and an uprising, but it’s hard not to be struck by the similarities. It’s hard not to imagine Syria turning into the same sectarian tinderbox as its neighbor. You can argue about how the different ethnic proportions mean that there’s less likely to be civil war, or how they mean that there will certainly be a massacre afterwards. The truth is, no one really knows. Everyone is using the same facts to spin their own wool that they can peddle out as an op-ed and around and around we go. 

To get back to my point, though, it is absolutely insane that ten years after the forced-march into war with Iraq there is now a significant contingent of the country next door calling for any kind of intervention, whatever form it ultimately takes. It is insane that Zarqawi is on the same side as the so-called Zionist conspiracy (although some would argue it’s not). It is insane that the Republican Party is on the same side as the UN. People in the US (those who can locate Syria on a map, anyway) are now sympathizing with an armed insurgency whose videos are as full of takbeer as any mujahideen’s. Don’t get me wrong—I think this insurgency has little if anything in common with the one fighting the US occupation, as much as it’s possible to be sure of anything in this revolution, but the superficial reality is worth seeing. It’s probably the one that’s going to be acted upon, and it’s as valuable as an overwrought analysis, at least. 

All the people I follow on Twitter don’t understand where the international community is. To be callous, I’m surprised they’re surprised. Every death in this revolution is heartbreaking, but these same countries and institutions have been immobilized by genocides. Syria’s 8000 are a drop in the ocean of deaths the international community should have been able to prevent. And many of those were in countries where intervention would have required far less delicacy than in Syria.

After the fall of Iraq, Syria made a concerted effort to be the stalwart against Western imperialism and unfortunately for everyone, it worked. There was hardly any European or American money in Syria. There were no opportunities given for the foreign hand to work its way in for “democracy building” and make contacts that could be exploited now. The only non-government American that I’m aware of who ever made real inroads with this regime was Andrew Tabler and he’s since been written off as a spy.  The Assads have spent many years stoking up jingoistic paranoia and bolstering themselves against nefarious foreign plots that it almost comes as a surprise that they’re succeeding. As the ICG astutely noted, the idiocy with which they treated the six months of peaceful protests has given truth to the lie they’ve been peddling in the capital and on television since March. And the longer it goes on, the more cemented it becomes. It’s one thing for Qaddafi or Saddam’s forces to drop arms and strip off uniforms the moment the capital falls. It’s another to be shelling and shooting your fellow citizens day in and out for a year. Cognitive dissonance to that level doesn’t just waltz off into the sunset.

All that is to say that I have been sitting here wringing my hands with everyone else, resigned to 10,000 deaths at the least, watching Homs turned into Hama. And I didn’t think the West should intervene. People calling for a no-fly zone or humanitarian aid from the West are well aware that their request will probably be granted a hundred times more than they want. The West doesn’t finesse, it lurches. Now, I think yes, it is inhuman not to provide medical supplies and other humanitarian aid. But still…intervention? Training the FSA? It’s hard not to be averse to supporting something that can easily be seen as a path to being held responsible when the situation devolves into a militarized sectarian clusterfuck, just like its neighbors.

But the writing is on the wall. How can the FSA or the LCCs unify when they can hardly move or communicate within their own cities? With all these discussions of what new mediator might be able to unify the opposition, the simplest option is never raised: there’s nothing more unifying than winning. There’s nothing for winning like arms. And if we don’t want to risk it if things don’t “run their natural course,” don’t forget: there are already two countries intervening in every practical way to aid the regime. There is no going back to life under Assad. Can you imagine? People can die for their freedom because if they don’t win freedom, they’ll die anyway. So the question is not if but when the West will lurch its way into this mess and even the playing field to the point where the opposition has a chance in hell of getting its act together to effect anything more than a Pyrrhic victory. The chances of failure are smaller while the best of these revolutionaries are still alive. 

If someone can point me to a country that has successfully crushed a yearlong insurrection in every city and ruled for more than a few years afterward…you should write an op-ed about it comparing it to Syria. 

the arabist era

I tend to do strange things like think there is an audience for writing about a subset of subsets, foreigners who know (or pretend to know) the Middle East. If you start with the number of English speakers who know or care about the Muslim world, divide that by people who have sat in an Arabic classroom, subtract from that the ones who actually made it to an Arabic speaking country and will thus understand and laugh at your jokes…you’d have the people who’d chuckle with me. How many of us in the world are there? 10,000? At most?

Not included in that made-up figure are lauded journalists who have spent their careers covering the Middle East, many of whom speak no Arabic or are conversational at best. I’m not saying this impacts their coverage one way or the other, because I can’t say yet if I think it does. (But I am surprised on a semi-regular basis by the mistranslations that make it into newspapers.) I was reading an article by Robert Fisk recently where he repeatedly says that we have been living through the most dangerous time in the Middle East. And I thought… Really? Not the Iran-Iraq war? Not the Lebanese civil war—that you covered? Not Sabra or Shatila or the many times over your career that you narrowly escaped with your life?  That quote, combined with a spate of Hitchens retrospectives documenting his sharp right turn after 9/11, got me thinking about the difference between the new and old Arabists. (A term I’m using for convenience’s sake.) 

There is fundamentally different reasoning behind the decision to learn Arabic prior to 9/11 and the decision to learn it after, that’s certain. People who have known the region for a long time seem to take personal issue with the rise of Al Qaeda and their ilk. Any of us in the swell of Arabic students after 9/11 most likely does not have this view of Islamic fundamentalism as something tangibly scary and new. It’s not distinct from some other idealized Middle East, it’s simply a fact of the region. Just like the guarantee you will be ripped off in any souq in any country, the fact simply exists that there is this contingent of people in this part of the world who might try to kill you. You might never cross paths with them, but there they are. And it seems to me that is a view that existed in a different way before 9/11. How many people on September 10th took Al Qaeda’s threats to heart, really? Aside from the Cassandras whose reporting or intelligence was ignored, it was unthinkable to everyone—most of all to the people who thought they knew the region best. I’m not saying they didn’t know the Islamic revival was on the rise or that these scary types were out there. Just that they waved it off, thinking it would not or could not gain enough traction to make it out of those corners they’d once visited or heard about and follow them home.

On September 11th I was goofing off in band class, rehearsing an instrument I don’t play anymore. The year before when asked to label the Middle East on a balloon representing the world, I put Israel in Saudi Arabia. (I didn’t have a smart enough ass to label it Palestine.) Although I would never call 9/11 a life-changing moment, the news I heard while trying to balance a pencil on my nose took me, in one way or another, to within sight of the country who produced Osama Bin Laden and a highway exit away from the country we pretended was behind him. Years of debating the resulting war at the dinner table and complaining that no one in the government understood would lead to learning myself, pulling me toward the same messes my government jumped into. And now on Christmas Day, I’m the one who can reliably explain the origin of the Sunni-Shi’a split and asked what I think about the Arab Spring. I never thought I would feel personal anguish about car bombs in Damascus. But I do. Certainly not at a level comparable to anything at all, but enough that my feeling of not wanting to be the dinner table pundit was genuine.

Anyway, I have absolutely nothing to back any of this up (which probably means it should be published in the Independent) but it’s something to start to think about.