The Israeli Army’s Chief of Staff Benny Gantz says Israel is preparing to take in refugees following the downfall of Syria’s Bashar al-Assad. The interesting part is that Israel is expecting refugees from the Alawite minority and to house them on the Golan Heights.

The Assad family and most of the regime are Alawites at war with the Sunni Muslim majority. The Golan Heights​ was taken from Syria in the 1967 war when Damascus used it as a platform to shoot at and shell Israeli civilians in the Galilee far below.

When Assad demands the Golan Heights back, he does not have it in mind as a refugee camp under the stewardship of his enemies for his overthrown clan.

Read the rest in Commentary magazine.

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A few days ago the U.S. Navy rescued 13 Iranian fishermen who had been held hostage on their own boat by pirates for a month in the Arabian Sea (between Oman and India).

Iran’s foreign minister described the rescue as a humanitarian act, but the state-run Fars News Agency says our Navy turned a routine incident into a “Hollywood” drama.

I don’t believe the United States military routinely rescues Iranians, but let’s leave that aside for right now. What Tehran’s propagandists are concerned about here is the imagery. That’s what they mean when they play the “Hollywood” card. Hollywood is all about imagery. They’re saying the rescue was also all about imagery.

Okay, so let’s take a look at the imagery. What we have here is a picture of an Iranian fisherman hugging a member of the United States military.

The odds that a random working-class American will ever voluntarily hug anyone in Iran’s Revolutionary Guard Corps is just about zero. The FNA would love to get its mitts on such a picture, but it’s never going to happen unless it is photoshopped.

We can’t know the political opinions of the Iranian man in that photo. We don’t even know who he is. The odds are decent, though, that the fisherman has a more positive opinion of the United States than he has of his own repressive government. It’s almost certainly true of at least some of the rescued 13, and it might even be true of most of them. The hacks at FNA know it, too, and it must be driving them crazy.

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I’m having technical difficulties at the moment. Blogging will resume when I figure out what the problem is and how to resolve it. Thanks for being patient.

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Earlier this year the Israeli government agreed to release more than a thousand Palestinian prisoners, many of them terrorists, in exchange for the release of the captured soldier Gilad Shalit. If even two Israelis are killed by that batch, Israel will have gotten the raw end of the deal.

Everyone seems to understand this. The math isn’t difficult. They understood it at the time, too. The government, though, had been under enormous pressure from the entire society for years to strike even a bad deal. That pressure was fueled by emotion. The emotion was entirely legitimate, of course. Leaving an individual human being with the wolves—an individual human being with a name, a face, and a family—for the safety of the society in the abstract is a nasty thing even to contemplate, especially when Shalit’s name and face appeared on posters all over the country.

A thousand for one is bad math. More people will die with these sorts of exchanges than without them, especially since they give Hamas an incentive to kidnap even more people. Now that Hamas isn’t holding any Israelis captive, however, the math can be computed without emotion. New rules for prisoner exchanges will likely prevent any more similarly lopsided deals. The rational Israel of today is binding a more-emotional Israel of the future by law. Lives will be saved. We can’t know their names, but they will be saved. And there will be fewer kidnap victims to agonize over.

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This week, a few hundred students and teachers at Manouba University in Tunisia demonstrated against the niqab, or veil, which is used by some ultra-conservative women to cover their faces. It has been outlawed in Tunisian schools and government offices for decades, ever since it was described by the modern republic’s secular founder Habib Bourguiba​ as “that odious rag.” One sign at the demonstration said “Science before the niqab.” Another said “no to shackles, no to niqab, knowledge is free.” The protest was a counter-demonstration against an Islamist sit-in at the humanities department.

I’ve seen a few women in Tunisian cities wearing niqabs, but not very many. That kind of headgear is far more common in the Persian Gulf nations than in North Africa. While having coffee at an outdoor café in downtown Tunis, the capital, a group of women with their faces covered walked past. All the locals sitting at tables near mine eyed the women as though they had been beamed in from another planet. I assumed these ladies weren’t even Tunisians, but Saudis. They could hardly have drawn more attention to themselves had they dressed like that in a small town in Bolivia.

Read the rest in Commentary magazine.

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I have a new essay in the January/February issue of World Affairs about the Arab Spring, which is looking more and more like an Islamist winter with each passing month. The piece is behind the pay wall at the moment, but you can read it if you have a subscription. And you should have a subscription becasue it’s an outstanding magazine, one of the best in the business.

It will be out from behind the subscription wall by the time the next issue is out. Then I can link it again.

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Walid Jumblatt, the leader of Lebanon’s Druze community, was for a time the most strident and defiant leader of the Beirut Spring, or Cedar Revolution, that ousted Syria’s occupying military dictatorship in 2005. But in 2008, Hezbollah and its allies in Amal and the Syrian Social Nationalist Party invaded Beirut and the Druze mountains southeast of the capital. Jumblatt was then compelled to turn against his allies in the “March 14” movement and temporarily join Lebanon’s pro-Syrian bloc. Fortunately for him and his community, he was only forced to do so at arm’s length.

The Arab world’s Druze do not have their own state. Like the Kurds, they are fragmented and live as minorities in more than one country. In each place they side with the strong horse—to use Osama bin Laden’s phrase for the most powerful leader around—in order to stay out of trouble. Israeli Druze are pro-Zionist. Syrian Druze are, or at least have been so far, with Bashar al-Assad. Lebanon’s political scene gets rebooted every couple of years, so the Druze there shift around all over the place. You can always tell which Lebanese faction is dominant because they’ll have Walid Jumblatt on their side.

Jumblatt has been slowly inching away from Damascus again for some time as the revolution against Assad has continued to spread and to grow. The Druze chief’s transistion is nearly complete. He is now openly calling for regime-change in Syria.

Assad has been therefore demoted, at least in his backyard, from strong horse to weak horse. Out of desperate necessity, Jumblatt’s political instincts are more finely calibrated than just about anyone else’s around, and he is convinced that the butcher of Damascus is on his way to becoming the ex-horse or even a dead horse.

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When two suicide bombers allegedly blew themselves up in front of mukhabarat offices in Damascus a week ago, my first thought was that Al Qaeda did it. The world’s most radical Sunni Arab terrorist organization has worked with the Assad family before, but now that the “infidel” Alawite regime is massacring Sunnis by the thousands, albeit in medium if not slow motion, what’s for a bin Ladenist to like? Suicide bombings certainly fit the modus operandi.

My second thought, which occurred to me within seconds, is that the Syrian government did this to itself.

I chose not to say so in print or in pixels because that sort of charge is almost always outlandish. It’s the sort of idea conspiracy theorists hatch in the tea shops of Cairo and the coffeeshops of Haight–Ashbury. You’d better have some serious evidence before going public with something like that even if we are talking about the Assads.

Well, Michael Weiss at World Affairs found some evidence that Damascus is behaving in a way that is at the very least odd.

According to the Syrian state media, suicide bombers drove two cars rigged with explosives to points just outside two hard-to-reach facilities: the State Security Administration building and the Military Security base in Kafarsouseh, a neighborhood in central Damascus. These facilities are preceded by several military checkpoints, and any person or vehicle desiring access to them will need to carry a special permit. Cars also tend to be searched thoroughly before being able to roll right on up to the doorstep of secret police headquarters. When a terrorist attack is perpetrated, it takes oodles of man-hours of forensic analysis and data-gathering to determine the party responsible and the methods used. Not so in Syria. The regime’s Syrian Arab News Agency (SANA) reported in an impressive 13 minutes that al-Qaeda was the culprit and that a man called Munir al-Binjali “conducted” the attack. The only problem is, al-Binjali is alive and well in Saudi Arabia, not blown to bits in Damascus.

There’s plenty more where that came from, including a hilarious announcement on state TV that the terrorists who blew themselves to smithereens had been “arrested.” An Arab League observer claimed the bodies appeared to have been moved to the blast site a little too perfectly from somewhere else. And when the Al Qaeda story finally collapsed under its own absurdity, Syrian intelligence set up a fake Muslim Brotherhood Web site and forged a responsibility claim.

Saad Hariri—Lebanon’s former prime minister, son of the slain former prime minister Rafik Hariri, and a man not known for conspiracy theories—is now saying, yeah, the Syrians staged it.

Whether or not the Assad clan is responsible, they’re definitely up to shenanigans.

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Sky News reports two separate anti-regime demonstrations in Syria — one in Idlib province, and the other in Hama — that swelled to 250,000 people apiece. Security forces opened fire, killing five and wounding a couple of dozen.

Those first two numbers are huge. The second two numbers are not. Think of it this way. If fifty people out of a half-million were shot, that’s only one in 5,000, or 0.0002 percent. It’s not safe to take to the streets and challenge the government, but it hardly means certain death or arrest anymore. Assad’s totalitarian stranglehold over his citizens has completely evaporated.

The security forces have enough firepower to massacre thousands per day if they’re given the orders to do so. That’s what happened in 1982 in the city of Hama. The government actually boasted about killing tens of thousands of people in one weekend alone.

We can only guess why that’s not happening today, but I’m reasonably certain it is not because Bashar al-Assad is more squeamish or less-determined to win than his father, Hafez al-Assad, who ruled the country in 1982. What most likely explains the government’s relative restraint is the fact that Damascus fears foreign intervention.

Assad knows if he kills fewer than 50 people a day he likely won’t be punished with anything more severe than isolation and sanctions. There is no real appetite in the Arab world, the West, or in Israel for armed confrontation. If the crisis can be kept at a low enough boil, Assad most likely thinks he can withstand it.

Syria’s opposition is overwhelmingly Sunni while the government is overwhelmingly Alawite. Massacring tens of thousands of unarmed Sunnis all at once would bring serious and credible accusations of genocide. Many governments in both the Arab world and the West would start thinking about and even discussing a military intervention to stop it. I slightly doubt Syria would be invaded even then, but it is possible, and it is Assad’s worst nightmare scenario.

So he’s “only” killing a few handfuls of people each day. He might be able to keep that up for years without bringing a regime-change from abroad down on his head.

There’s a problem, though, with that strategy. I am not better at math than the people of Syria. They, too, can compute that the odds they’ll be shot in a demonstration are only one in 5,000. Their incentive to hide under the bed rather than take to the streets is not large.

Assad, then, is finding himself in a vise. If he kills too few people, they may eventually bring him down. And if he kills too many, we might bring him down.

Dwight Eisenhower once said, “If you can’t solve a problem, enlarge it.” Sometimes that’s good advice, so watch out. Assad might try it and hope for the best.

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Happy New Year, everybody.

I’ll be working on my next book, Where the West Ends, over the next couple of days, and I might go hiking over the weekend if the rain clears.

See you in 2012.

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I can count on one finger the number of movies based on comic books that I like. They aren’t for me, but Christopher Nolan’s The Dark Knight is a major exception. It’s a serious and instantly classic crime film that transcends the limitations and silliness of the genre.

Nolan’s next film looks fantastic, as well.

There were faint echoes of the war against terrorism in The Dark Knight—not as allegory or argument, but as context as Peter Suderman notes in Reason. In The Dark Knight Rises—or in the trailer, at least—we hear whispers of a communist insurgency.

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Russia has never been the kind of place many people feel has a warm and fuzzy future ahead of it, but it’s better prepared today for something that looks like political liberalism than Egypt or Libya. The anti-communist revolution that brought down Soviet totalitarianism made Russia and the world as a whole much better places than they were, but Boris Yeltsin and Vladimir Putin were hardly the Vaclav Havels of the east.

Today, though, the biggest demonstrations since the end of communist rule are rocking the capital. Vladimir Putin may actually be on his way out. He doesn’t seem the sort who would massacre thousands of civilians Assad-style in the streets, nor are his opponents the sorts who yearn for a different brand of authoritarianism.

“By its sheer size and scope,” Vladimir Kara-Murza writes in World Affairs, “the protest movement of December 2011 is being compared to the anti-Communist revolution of August 1991.”

In one respect, today’s movement is more significant. The protest against Communist rule was both political and economic: not just against totalitarianism, but also against the economic misery of Soviet socialism. Today, economic demands are non-existent: the December movement is unequivocally and consciously about political rights and civic dignity. The protests are led by Russia’s emerging middle class—young, successful, and educated—which has already achieved economic wellbeing, and which now strives for the rule of law. According to a survey by the Levada Center polling agency, 73 percent of the protesters are financially comfortable; 62 percent are university-educated; 56 percent are aged between 18 and 39. Sixty-nine percent describe their political views as democratic or liberal. Only 13 percent are communists; just 6 percent are nationalists.

Russia is a cold place where spring comes weakly and late, but maybe—just maybe—it is finally coming.

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While the Turkish government admits that huge numbers of Armenians were massacred during the last days of the Ottoman Empire, it has long denied the killings constitute genocide. It’s actually a crime to use the word genocide in that context. Turks who do so face prison.

Now France has just decided to criminalize its denial. French people who promote the Turkish position face prison.

I trust that my American readers understand instinctively why this is no way to end debates about history. Not only would neither of these laws pass constitutional muster in the United States, hardly anyone would even consider trying to pass one or the other. Unlike some countries in Europe, we have no law criminalizing Holocaust denial, yet the number of Americans who believe the Holocaust is a lie approaches the vanishing point. And it wouldn’t even occur to us to ban discussion of the darkest episodes in American history because doing so besmirches our “honor.”

Claire Berlinski at Ricochet decided to break both laws this week because she’s an American, because she feels that she must, and because she can. She lives in Istanbul and spent Christmas with her family in Paris. So she denied the Armenian genocide while she was in France, and she affirms it now that she’s back in Turkey.

Meanwhile, the Israeli government is charting a middle course and considering a legal recognition that the genocide happened, but eschewing a ban on its verbal or written denial. Israelis have been reluctant to antagonize their allies in Ankara by doing so, but the Turkish prime minister is so hell-bent on sabotaging the relationship that Jerusalem figures it has nothing to lose.

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I might be back here before Christmas and I might not. I know from watching my Internet traffic in earlier years that many of you will not be. So let me say now that I hope you all have a Merry Christmas. And I’ll definitely be back between Christmas and the New Year, though posting may be a bit on the slow side.

Cheers.

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Presidential hopeful Newt Gingrich drew quite a lot of attention to himself, not all of it good, when he recently declared the Palestinians an “invented people.” I didn’t feel like wading into the controversy, but it hasn’t entirely quieted down yet, and I can’t resist drawing your attention to Lee Smith’s response.

But first, briefly, my own reponse: Yes, Palestinian identity is of recent “invented” vintage, but it’s no more recent or invented than Jordanian identity, and every single last person in Jordan knows perfectly well that Jordanians and Palestinians are very different indeed. Hundreds of thousands of Palestinians live in Lebanon and, believe me, they are not indistingishable from some great mass of Lebanese “Arabs.” The same goes for Palestinians everywhere else, including Egypt, Syria, and the Persian Gulf region. (No Arabs are more different from Palestinians than the Gulfies.)

The problem with arguing that Palestinians are “just Arabs,” as Gingrich more or less did, is that it’s Nasserist. It accepts as given the lies of Arab nationalism, a repressive ideology based on the supposed supremacism of an identity that didn’t really even exist until the last days of the Ottoman Empire.

Lee Smith explains it at least as well as, if not better than, I can, so I’ll hand you over to him.

It should be clear to even the most casual observer of the Middle East that the Arabs are anything but unified. Iraq’s conflict between Sunnis and Shiites, as we now understand, was only the tip of the iceberg in a region where civil war is not an exception but the norm. The Bahraini and Syrian uprisings are effectively sectarian revolutions against the established, and repressive, orders. Even in Egypt, Muslim violence against the Coptic Christian community reveals the true sectarian nature of the region.

The theorists behind 20th-century Arab nationalism recognized the region’s sectarianism and tribalism—which is why they proposed an identity based not on sect or tribe but rather on shared attributes, like language. The inhabitants of the region, from Western North Africa to the Persian Gulf, all spoke some variation of Arabic, thus they were Arabs. Their particularities, whether ethnic (Kurdish, for instance) or sectarian (Christian, Shia, etc.) were insignificant in comparison to their Arab identity. According to ideologues like Sati’ al-Husri, they were Arabs whether they liked it or not.

Accordingly, Arab nationalism has been a coercive and repressive doctrine. Even though it was an idea intended to forestall the civil strife that arises from competing identities, in reality enforcing Arab nationalism has led to bloodshed throughout the Arabic-speaking Middle East. Under Saddam Hussein, Arab nationalism meant Sunni supremacism and the violent suppression of Kurds and Shiites. In Syria, the minority Alawite regime has used the doctrine to keep the Sunnis as well as the Kurds in line. In Lebanon, Hezbollah waves the banner of Arab nationalism in its fight against the Zionist entity, in order to intimidate and rule over other Lebanese sects. Violence and repression are key components of Arab nationalism, because as a totalitarian ideology like Communism and Nazism, it can brook no differences, no particularity.

Respecting that particularity is not only good for the inhabitants of the region but also for the interests of the United States and Israel. The United States has bilateral relations with other nation-states and political institutions like the Palestinian Authority. But this country is ill-equipped to deal with large amorphous bodies like the “Arab people” or, alternatively, the “Muslim world.”

The latter was the intended recipient of Obama’s Cairo speech in June 2009. Unfortunately, it seems not to have occurred to the president that the Muslim-majority Middle East comprises various Muslim sects often at odds, plus non-Muslims as well. By employing this particular fiction, the “Muslim world,” the Cairo speech happened to comport perfectly with the belief of Islamists who hold that non-Muslims and even Shiite Muslims are second-class subjects in the Sunni-majority Middle East, rather than individuals deserving of equal rights.

The “Arab people,” like the “Muslim world,” is an invention—and neither of them should hold much appeal for U.S. policy-makers.

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Haaretz reports that as many 10,000 Syrian soldiers have defected from Bashar al-Assad’s murderous army and that as many as half refused to show up the last three times they were called.

Assad may yet pull through, but at this point I’m guessing he won’t. If he doesn’t tighten his grip on Syria fast, he definitely won’t.

Hezbollah can survive without its Syrian patron, but his fall in Damascus will be felt in South Lebanon like a gut punch.

Before he was car-bombed on his way to work in the morning in 2005, the Lebanese journalist and activist Samir Kassir thought the Beirut Spring would cause roses to bloom in Damascus. It didn’t happen. The reverse, however, just might.

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“The United States does not want Iran to develop a nuclear weapon,” Defense Secretary Leon Panetta told CBS News. “That’s a red line for us.”

I hear that phrase in the Middle East more often than I hear it in the United States. Crossing a government-enforced red line in that part of the world tends to get a person imprisoned or killed. I don’t know if Panetta is aware that the statement he made is much stronger than President Barack Obama’s previous statement than an Iranian nuclear weapon is merely “unacceptable,” but the effect is the same either way. The Iranian government just heard the audible click of a ratchet.

Walter Russell Mead thinks most of us are underestimating the odds that the Obama administration will go to war to prevent Iran from acquiring nuclear weapons.

Ron Paul may join the Truther movement and the moonbat brigade in screaming “Wag the dog!” but the administration has been carefully preparing the groundwork for a confrontation for some time — while holding open the possibility that the US will change its approach if Iran will drop the bomb program. That doesn’t seem to be working, and we now seem to be in something of a pre-war atmosphere with Iran.

I still have my doubts that the administration will actually go through with it for a couple of reasons. The Bush administration wasn’t interested, and that crowd was considerably more hawkish than the current one. A war with Iran would likely turn regional within 24 hours and could involve Lebanon, Israel, Syria, Gaza, and possibly even Iraq. And the U.S. may well be bluffing. The Iranian government might flinch if it thinks it’s on the brink of war even if it is not.

Mead is right, though, either way. War is hardly inevitable and it may not even be likely, but the general atmospherics are more pre-war than they’ve been.

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I’m not sure what to make of this, but, well, it exists, and it made me chuckle once.

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An Albanian reader in the comments posted a link to a YouTube video montage shot in Albania. If you’ve been watching news coverage about the passing of North Korea’s “Dear Leader” in the last 24 hours, much of it will look eerily familiar.

Enver Hoxha’s Stalinst regime in Albania was every bit as bad and in many ways almost identical. The difference, of course, is that Albanian communism and well as its architect Enver Hoxha (pronounced HO-juh) are finished forever.

Someday we’ll see a video like this one from North Korea, including its happier ending.

If you want to know what Pyongyang might look like 20 years after the fall of the Kim family, pay a visit to Tirana, Albania.

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It’s a shame we don’t still have Hitch around to write obituaries for Vaclav Havel and Kim Jong Il, but we do have his commentaries from when they were all still alive.

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