By Jared Levy and Ali Gharib
WASHINGTON, Jun 5 2009 (IPS)

After emerging from a political crisis last year, the Lebanese people will head to the polls Jun. 7 to determine the composition of the new parliament. A variety of foreign powers, including the U.S., will be watching closely, waiting for the electoral results before they determine their policies towards the new government.

The outcome is especially important because many analysts view the elections through the lens of the struggle between U.S. and Iranian regional hegemonic aspirations.

No one is sure whether the Saad al-Hariri’s Western-backed March 14 alliance will retain its parliamentary majority, or whether the balance of power will shift to the Iranian-backed March 8 movement, led by the Shi’a militant group Hezbollah and the Free Patriotic Movement of Maronite Christian Michael Aoun.

An agreement after Hezbollah took the Sunni Arab neighbourhoods of Beirut by force a year ago strengthened Hezbollah’s opposition, granting their coalition veto power over actions of the government. Now the group is looking to expand its power and perhaps take the helm of government.

The U.S. has designated Hezbollah, an armed Shia group that also serves as a social organisation and political party for much of Lebanon’s Shia population, a terrorist group

Asked by National Public Radio on Monday whether the U.S. would recognise electoral gains by Hezbollah, U.S. President Barack Obama stumbled through an answer which indicated that he was waiting to see what happened in the election.

“Well, look, if at some point – Lebanon is a member of the United Nations – if at some point they are elected as a head of state, or a head of state is elected in Lebanon that is a member of that organisation, then that would raise these issues. That hasn’t happened yet,” he said.

While the U.S. currently supports Lebanon under a government in which Hezbollah is in opposition, a government there led by the group and its allies might draw concern in Washington, where support for Hezbollah’s adversary Israel and antipathy towards the group’s patron, Iran, run deep.

The elections, however unpredictable, do retain the typical character of Lebanese politics: several regional and international players have a stake in the process.

The list of countries deeply interested in the elections goes beyond the usual Mideast regional players – Iran, Syria, Saudi Arabia and Egypt – and into the realm of international powers such as the U.S., France and Russia.

The Obama administration deemed the Lebanese election important enough to dispatch Vice President Joe Biden to Beirut last week – the first time in 25 years that a sitting U.S. president or vice president has visited Lebanon.

Biden said that he hadn’t come to back any specific Lebanese party, but he later remarked that the U.S. “will evaluate the shape of our assistance programmes based on the composition of the new government.”

“When there is an American embrace, it almost always backfires, particularly in the Middle East,” said the National Democratic Institute’s (NDI) Les Campbell, at a panel hosted by the Washington-based Aspen Institute.

At the same panel, Middle East analyst and al-Hayat correspondent Raghida Dergham referenced the involvement of outside players in Lebanon, calling the country a laboratory where regional power struggles are carried out between countries like Iran, Syria and Israel.

In addition to the struggle between external powers, Dergham said the stakes were even higher for Lebanon itself.

“If Hezbollah wins, the fabric of society may change. The meaning of ‘the state’ may change,” she said, though she insisted she wasn’t predicting a Hezbollah victory. She said she feared another violent conflict with Israel, which fought a 34-day war with Hezbollah in the summer of 2006.

“I’m afraid the Netanyahu government wants to shield themselves from a peace process, and Lebanon might be the platform to do that if Hezbollah wins,” she said.

The U.S. has not telegraphed how it would react to a Hezbollah win, but experts have made some predictions.

“If Hezbollah and its allies win a majority and they lead the next government, at that point we will see the Obama administration pull back in the level of what aid it provides militarily,” said Council on Foreign Relations (CFR) fellow Mohammad Bazzi during a press call. “We may see a continuation in training, but there will be a pullback in arms [aid].”

Indeed, when another Islamic “resistance” group, Hamas, won Palestinian Authority (PA) elections, it was largely frozen out by the West, including the U.S., which withdrew or diverted some 400 million dollars of aid to the PA.

The U.S. has been supporting the Lebanese military, which is widely viewed as a unifying national institution, with the intention of bolstering it. The army, however, has neither the mandate nor the ability to carry U.N. resolution 1771, which calls for the disarmament of all Lebanese militias.

It is unlikely Hezbollah will opt to form a government on its own. Rather, to make the new government more palatable – both within Lebanon and abroad – a coalition with elements of the March 14th movement is likely.

Despite Hariri’s publicly saying he will not join a government led by the March 8th coalition – Hezbollah and its allies – NDI’s Campbell believes that, regardless of which side emerges from the election with more seats, “there will likely be a unity government.”

Campbell sees claims to the contrary by March 14th leaders as an effort to impress the importance of turnout upon their constituents.

Hezbollah’s coalition already includes Aoun, who, despite aligning himself with Hezbollah, has some sharply divergent political goals. Such allies, whose support would be needed for a March 8th victory, would likely moderate Hezbollah’s agenda.

Pointing to a likely national unity government, the close U.S. relationship with Lebanese president and former army general Michel Suleiman, and the fact that leading the government would make Hezbollah accountable to the public, Financial Times columnist Roula Khalaf argued that the U.S. should support whomever emerges from the elections.

“[A]t a time when President Barack Obama is on a mission to improve America’s battered image in the Muslim world… it would be a mistake to punish voters for making what the U.S. considered to be the wrong choice,” Khalaf wrote.

“At a time when the U.S. is trying to engage Syria and Iran,” Khalaf continued, “it can surely find justification for respecting the choice of Lebanese voters, even if it finds the outcome of the elections disagreeable.”

Indeed, the U.S. special envoy for Mideast peace, former Senator George Mitchell, will visit the region next week. Though the State Department would not confirm his itinerary, there is speculation that Mitchell’s trip will include his first visit to Syria as special envoy.

In her blog at Foreign Policy, Laura Rozen revealed that Mitchell will make a stop in Lebanon in the period immediately following the election.

Last month, the German newspaper Der Spiegel wrote a bombshell article which asserted that leaks from an investigation into the assassination of Lebanese Prime Minister Rafiq al-Hariri – Saad’s father – reveal that Hezbollah was involved.

Some commentators, including politicians from both sides of the Lebanese political spectrum, have debated the veracity of the Der Spiegel article – some noting its timing just before the elections.

Excerpt:

By Ali Gharib and Jared Levy
WASHINGTON, Jun 4 2009 (IPS)

U.S. President Barack Obama’s historic speech in Cairo Thursday elicited broad approval from around the U.S., with the notable exception of the neoconservative right.

Obama’s speech itself was largely uncontroversial. Broad in scope and thin on policy specifics, Obama frankly acknowledged a troubled history that has manifested itself in today’s anti-Western Muslim extremism.

But rather than focus on divergences, Obama proposed a “new beginning” between the U.S. and Muslim world by engagement based on “mutual interest and mutual respect”, garnishing his speech with an Arab phrases and references to peaceful coexistence in religious texts including the Koran.

The reactions of much of the U.S. pundit class were overwhelmingly positive – acknowledging that Obama tackled prickly subjects in the relationship between Muslims around the world and U.S. foreign policy goals.

“Obama acknowledged room for disagreement and contestation and showed that he understands and respects alternative views even when he does not share them,” wrote the scholar Stephen Walt on his ‘Foreign Policy’ blog. “Yet there are also clear limits to his tolerance: the speech included a forthright rejection of violence… and a clear statement of the American commitment to basic human rights.”

“[H]e has committed himself to a set of principles and policies in front of the entire world,” concluded Walt. “Now he needs to follow up words with deeds. And so do his listeners.”

Obama broke down his speech into sections, addressing “violent extremism”; the Israeli-Arab conflict; nuclear weapons; democracy; religious freedom; women’s rights; and “development and opportunity”.

Former Israeli negotiator and New America Foundation fellow Daniel Levy noted that, in addition to the breadth of subjects addressed, “this speech should perhaps be remembered as much for what was not said.”

Obama didn’t praise the autocratic Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak (long a darling of the U.S. for his allegiance), nor discuss the “purple finger version of democratisation”, nor make mention of “the traditional American condescension toward the Palestinian narrative”, wrote Levy on his blog, ‘Prospects for Peace’.

“But perhaps most remarkably of all, the words ‘terror’ or ‘terrorism’ did not pass the president’s lips,” he wrote. “Here was a leader and a team around him smart enough to acknowledge that certain words have become too tainted, too laden with baggage, their use has become counter-productive, today the Global War on Terror framing was truly laid to rest.”

Muslim- and Arab-American groups praised Obama’s speech for its nuance and scope.

“It was a full agenda, making clear how deep a hole we’re in,” Arab-American Institute president James Zogby told the USA Today newspaper.

“This was a speech that was light years away from the hateful rhetoric of the [former President George W.] Bush years,” wrote a Palestinian-American Michigan State professor, Rossina Hassoun, in an account published on a blog.

“I actually heard an American president admit that the U.S. had overthrown a legally elected government in Iran. I actually heard an American president acknowledging the suffering and dislocation of the Palestinian people. I heard an American president deny the inevitability of the clash of civilizations,” she wrote.

The sharpest divergences in U.S. reaction came on issues regarding the Palestinian-Israeli conflict.

It was one area of the speech where Obama offered a few specifics, reiterating his call to end settlements by noting that the U.S. “does not accept the legitimacy of continued Israeli settlements” and calling for Palestinians to focus on their own development.

Obama referred to “Palestine”, an uncommon reference to a state that remains only an aspiration.

The pro-Israeli far right-wing of U.S. commentators roundly blasted the speech in disparate ways such as ridiculing it for naiveté and simply denouncing it as “awful”, as former New York Sun journalist Ira Stoll labeled his post on the blog of the neoconservative magazine Commentary.

“What an awful speech,” Stoll blurted at the beginning of his post, going on to lament the positioning of millions of stateless “Palestinian Arabs as the victims.”

The Republican Jewish Coalition (RJC) complained, rather incredibly, that “Obama struck a balanced tone with regard to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and that’s what was wrong with this speech.”

“American policy should not be balanced,” continued the RJC release, deriding Palestinians as “those who either engage in [terror] or are too weak to prevent it.”

Other mainstream Jewish groups took more balanced lines, often praising parts of the speech and complaining about others.

The chairman of the Conference of Presidents of Major Jewish Organisations, Alan Solow, who supported Obama, told the Jewish Telegraphic Agency (JTA) that the speech was “one that was quite positive,” though he hoped for tougher rhetoric on Iran.

MJ Rosenberg, the head of policy analysis at the pro-peace Israel Policy Forum (IPF), wrote on the Talking Points Memo Café site that Obama’s speech was a landmark in the relationship between Islam and West.

“Not only did the speech specifically reject western (and American) colonialism, its entire tone was the antithesis of colonial,” wrote Rosenberg. “This is a profoundly different American voice, one that will do much to advance American goals rather than to sabotage them.”

IPF, in a statement, “strongly applaud[ed] President Obama’s historic, bold and wide-ranging speech,” and was “heartened” by Obama’s robust efforts towards the two-state solution.

On the website of the National Review Online, neoconservative American Enterprise Institute scholar Michael Rubin asserted that “Obama studiously avoids the word democracy.”

But Obama introduced a discussion of democracy as one of the six topics he directly addressed at length. In fact, as he launched into the discussion, Obama used the very word that Rubin accused him of dodging: “The fourth issue that I will address is democracy.”

Obama then used the word itself three more times, and, for good measure, once described the word by its definition: “A government of the people and by the people.”

He also went on, in addition to using the word, to give a nuanced view of democracy. He dispelled what was a common criticism of the Bush administration that it conflated institutions of democracy with elections.

“[E]lections alone do not make true democracy,” he said, noting the importance of maintaining a democratic mandate, minority rights, “confidence in the rule of law,” transparency, justice, and basic freedoms.

Excerpt:

By Ali Gharib and Jared Levy
WASHINGTON, Jun 3 2009 (IPS)

In his most widely anticipated speech to date, U.S. President Barack Obama will reach out directly to the Muslim world Thursday morning at Cairo University.

The address will set out an approach – likely broad, but at times with specific concrete goals – designed to ease the concerns of many of the globe’s 1.4 billion Muslims, many of whom view the U.S. and its foreign policy negatively. But his attempt is fraught with stumbling blocks.

On Monday, Obama told the French television channel ‘Canal Plus’ that he intends to “create a better dialogue” by “provid[ing] a framework, a speech of how I think we can remake relations between the United States and countries in the Muslim world.”

In the interview he also spoke of a knowledge deficit about Islam in the U.S. and the West, and said that “we have to educate ourselves more effectively on Islam.”

Obama intends to distance himself from the policies of his predecessor, the wildly unpopular George W. Bush, and present a new image to the Muslim and Arab worlds.

Speaking to the BBC on Monday, however, Obama flatly denied that his speech would be an apology for U.S. policies of the past, including the two wars in Iraq and Afghanistan – the latter which Obama is significantly escalating – and U.S. detention and interrogation policies in those countries as well as the military’s Guantanamo Bay facility.

Obama, born to a Muslim father, is expected to lay out U.S positions that would put a more friendly face on the U.S.-led “war on terror,” which was perceived by many Muslims as an assault on their faith.

He also is expected to reiterate recent calls for a two-state solution to the Palestinian-Israeli conflict, and discuss some concrete measures for accomplishing it.

But already, the choice to deliver the speech in Egypt, the largest Arab country and an undemocratic U.S. ally, has brought some controversy.

Confronted by the BBC, Obama refused to call Egyptian dictator Hosni Mubarak an “authoritarian”, saying he rejects such labels, but acknowledged “criticisms of the manner in which politics operates in Egypt”.

Egyptians, for their part, are sceptical of the U.S. change of course under Obama, but his ratings are considerably better than Bush, according to a survey of Egyptians by WorldPublicOpinion.org, a website of the University of Maryland’s Programme on International Policy Attitudes (PIPA).

Thirty-nine percent of Egyptians have faith that Obama will make sound decisions about U.S. foreign policy, and 46 percent view the U.S. favourably, compared with 27 percent under Bush.

But Obama faces even more daunting polling numbers on other questions. Sixty-seven percent of Egyptians think the U.S. has a negative impact on the globe and three-quarters think the U.S. is trying to weaken and divide the Muslim world. Four of five Egyptians think the U.S. is out to dominate Middle Eastern oil, and the same number think the U.S. is trying to impose its culture on Muslim countries.

PIPA notes that these views are largely unchanged from polling in 2008 and that Obama is seen as harbouring the same goals as the U.S. in general.

With Egypt’s oppressive politics and human rights violations and its standing as a close U.S. ally, many Egyptians see the U.S. as unsupportive of democracy. Four in 10 respondents thought that the U.S. does not support democracy in the Muslim world.

“We are… alarmed by signals that the Obama’s administration’s support for democracy may have waned,” wrote Egyptian dissident Ayman Nour in the New York Times on Wednesday, noting that democracy funding for Egypt had gone down.

“We don’t expect Mr. Obama to bring progress to Egypt,” he wrote. “But we expect him to demand freedom for all and to restate his conviction that oppressive regimes march on the wrong side of history.”

Some fear that no matter what Obama says, his association with dictators like Mubarak will hinder his outreach.

A former Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) counter-terrorism official, Michal Scheuer, said on Al Jazeera English television that standing hand-in-hand with Mubarak was a better recruitment tool for global Muslim terrorism than pictures of abuse of Muslim prisoners in Guantanamo Bay.

Many pundits are urging the president to speak out forcefully in favor of democracy – the sort of rhetoric for which Bush’s so-called ‘freedom agenda’ was known.

“Although there are many expectations for this speech, one that Mr. Obama hopefully will disappoint is the expectation that he will walk away from what President George W. Bush called ‘the freedom agenda,'” wrote neoconservative American Enterprise Institute scholar and former Bush-era defence official Paul Wolfowitz in the Wall Street Journal. “That would be a great mistake for the U.S. and for the Muslim world.”

“The freedom agenda” was the name Bush gave to his democracy promotion programmes, which were widely discredited by the war in Iraq, U.S. detention policies, Bush’s continued support of authoritarian allies, and his repudiation of elections won by opponents of U.S. policy, such as the militant group Hamas’s victory in Palestinian Authority elections.

Egypt has its own Hamas-connected Islamist dissidents – most notably, the Muslim Brotherhood – whom Mubarak has cracked down on since the “Arab Spring” of 2005 when reform movements were gaining strength around the Arab world.

“The president should make clear that the U.S. does not believe that democracy can be imposed by force,” wrote Wolfowitz, who had a strong hand in the drive to the war on Iraq, itself intended to bring freedom and democracy to the “heart of the Middle East.”

Journalist and policy scholar at the Woodrow Wilson International Centre for Scholars Robin Wright also said that the people of the Muslim world – as opposed to their ruling regimes – do want to hear about democracy promotion.

“They want Obama to address issues of good government,” she said at a recent Wilson Centre panel on Obama’s trip. “They want him to deal with democratisation, but not ram it down their throat.”

Neoconservative Council on Foreign Relations scholar and former Bush democracy promotion adviser on the National Security Council Elliott Abrams was even more explicit that Obama should put the onus on the Muslim world to reform, writing in the Wall Street Journal about “the need for Muslim societies to open up so that every citizen can contribute his and especially her talents.”

“Political, social and gender limitations are preventing these societies and the people in them from realizing their God-given abilities,” wrote Abrams. “He should declare our complete belief in political freedom, democracy and equality of all citizens and of men and women.”

But not everyone believes that calling for sweeping changes in the Muslim world makes for the best outreach.

“I would argue that what he needs to do is address an issue which resonates with the Arab and Muslim world,” wrote Aaron David Miller, a former U.S. adviser on Mideast peace and a scholar at the Wilson Centre. “I would argue that issue is the Palestinian issue. He doesn’t have to lay down a peace plan, but he has to be a breaker of icons.”

Indeed, Obama is widely expected to use at least part of his speech to show support for the two-state solution, reiterating recent calls for concrete steps towards peace. Obama is currently engaged in a clash with the Israeli government over ending all settlement construction.

But at the Wilson Centre forum, Miller went farther, saying that Obama needed to do more than just talk.

“It is only a speech,” he said. “Words matter in this part of the world. Deeds matter more. There is an expectation (in the Muslim world) that he’s actually going to be able to deliver something.”

Excerpt: