Reconciliation won't cut it in Afghanistan

“War is not a festival,” the Taliban have said, but here in Kandahar City it is at least a paid week off. The 10th annual “spring offensive” began May 1st according to a Taliban statement warning Afghans to stay home to avoid the fireworks, and, as the clock struck midnight, the United Nations and many international aid groups locked up and checked out of Kandahar City, some going as far as Dubai. Meanwhile, vacation is over for the 475 Taliban prisoners sprung loose downtown last week: whether or not the “spring offensive” will bring as many road-side executions and political assassinations as the winter, it will surely bring the manpower.

“The city so nice, they named it twice” it may be, but 475 Taliban (including commanders) spawning smack dab in Kandahar City, Kandahar Province, is not what President Hamid Karzai had in mind when he launched the Afghan Peace and Reconciliation Program's “reintegration” campaign last June. Reintegration, or as an International Security Assistance Force how-to flyer puts it, “enabling local communities to welcome former insurgents back to Afghan society,” is a tough sell in a city where, despite being the epicenter of the hospitable Pashtunwali culture, a Westerner braving the streets would be lucky to be greeted with more than glares. The Pentagon's recent“Report on Progress Toward Security and Stability in Afghanistan” boasted 699 reintegrees throughout Afghanistan, but it is unlikely many of these hailed from the city where – contrary to an April Washington Post diagram showing “insurgent-controlled” ink spots surrounding Kandahar City in April '10 disappearing in April '11 – the Taliban are already at home.

As Sarah Chayes, an American writer in Kandahar City since 2001, once put it: “What is this culture that makes the Afghans, the famously bloodthirsty Afghans, welcome their mortal enemies into their midst, and show them courtesy?” Here, where word travels faster than Twitter, it is the intimidation. “I heard the son of Akhter is working with the Americans,” go the whispers. Last week the mayor reported that only 45 of the city's 125 municipality posts are filled, mostly because of Taliban death threats. Nearly ten years after the US Special Forces evicted Mullah Omar from his downtown mansion, fear of gossip and wandering eyes keeps Kandahar under the Taliban's spell.

This is not the place of roses described in last week's Pentagon report: Measuring since October 2010, “noticeable security gains are evident in Kandahar City and several critical surrounding districts,” the Pentagon assessed. Throughout the south, momentum is shifting “from the insurgency to the Afghan government and the coalition.” And, most importantly in COIN, “Afghan perceptions of security improved slightly.”

But the last is a spin too far: the footnoted details reveal that “positive” perceptions are in fact decreasing faster than “negative” perceptions. Such gloss in the face of record US fatalities (last month was by far America's deadliest April of the 10-year war) and mass intimidation in key cities, like Kandahar, suggests a fundamental underestimation of the insurgency's strength. Meanwhile, previous ISAF reports underestimate the insurgency's ideological zeal, pinning 80% as non-ideological grievance fighters. Such high-hoping explains why, as the April report puts it, “ISAF still does not fully understand the regenerative capacity of the insurgency.”

ISAF may begin drawing-down in July, but the diplomats are already drawing up – going to war with the understanding of the insurgency they have. In March came a report from Lakhdar Brahimi and Thomas R. Pickering claiming the time for talking to the Taliban has come. “Afghanistan: Negotiating Peace,” calls for “reconciliation” with the insurgents, whom President Karzai has already called “brothers.” Ambassador Pickering concedes that “the Taliban may press for tighter control in the name of Sharia,” but he sees “an opening”: “There are things that the Taliban have begun to move on: they're not eliminating all women's schools. That kind of thing.”

Unfortunately, even Ambassador Pickering's low standard of success is impossible without first securing the population. David Galula, a founding father of COIN theory, wrote, “the population will not talk unless it feels safe, and it does not feel safe until the insurgent's power has been broken.” Indeed, the population of nearby Zabul Province will not talk on cell phones unless the telecom providers feel safe, and for much of April they did not, thanks to the insurgency's unbroken power there. Yet for the “reconciliation” advocates, it seems what is most important is that the insurgents feel safe enough to talk.

Amrullah Saleh, the anti-Taliban hawk kicked out of his position as spy chief right when President Karzai's reconciliation program kicked off, and the planner of an anti-Taliban “national mobilization” protest set for Thursday in Kabul, recently told a Washington audience the ugly truth: “we hear the speeches of major Western politicians saying failure is not an option. Now it seems as if failure is an option.” Reconciliation and reintegration have their time in COIN, but not yet. Now is the time to fight the intimidation tactics and ideological appeal that have given the insurgency shadow control over some of Afghanistan's most important cities.

Recalling last week's Kandahar City prison break, one insurgent leader said “the most astonishing thing” was that while the escape lasted nearly five hours, it went unnoticed for another four. Fret as we might over reconciliation, we may soon notice there is no one left to reconcile.

A Revolution Foretold

So now the rainbow blood pumps in the hearts of the twittering youth of the Arab revolution. Theirs is not a war of artillery and generals, but of onions and vinegar and Google marketing execs, like 31-year old Wael Ghonim, who said as Hosni Mubarak fell last February, “I have never seen a revolution that was preannounced before.” Arabs planning protests? Arabs seeking democracy? You might think it a mawkish fad, but there are actually some people who “take a different view,” claims The New York Times: “[President Obama] made the point early on, a senior official said, that ‘this was a trend’ that could spread to other authoritarian governments in the region, including in Iran.” Can you imagine?

We needn't imagine, the Lebanese will say: there was the Independence Intifada of Lebanon in 2005, when, emboldened by American power, peaceful protestors of criss-crossed religions and a single confession of solidarity rejected the narrative of Syrian imperialism and Hezbollah militancy, and chose freedom and self-rule. This was in those dusty days before Twitter, but, by God, would you believe that the people were able to communicate with each other through a tradition of the olden days called “talking”?

And before Lebanon there was Iraq. Those who blush upon hearing George W. Bush’s Iraq dabbling called a proper revolution surely never knew (for to have known once would be to never forget) the pain of Iraqi mothers forced to applaud their sons’ short-straw executions and pay the regime for the bullets. The ghost of political opposition bid farewell to the Middle East during the Baathist and Alawite crushings of the early 1980s, and the region had since been a place of whispers and screams. The 2003 Iraqi invasion may have merely brought the screams from the prisons to the streets, but the hushed pamphleteers and poets could suddenly speak louder than ever before. In the darkness surrounding Iraq, glowing eyes watched curiously. After the 2005 elections the mayor of Baghdad said, “the governments of the region are nervous. The people of the region are envious.”

Indeed, not only is there precedent for the recent medley of Arab revolutions (in Tunisia and Egypt as well as foggy-destined Bahrain, Yemen, and Libya), but the precedent is also the cause. Egyptians will laugh and say, “We want the nightmares of Iraq? Right.” But there was a shame in sitting idle as the US Marines Corps and the 82nd Airborne gave Iraqis votes, a free press, female parliamentarians, one of the greatest ecological restorations in history (i.e. the Arab marshlands revival), and new dreams. Maybe Egyptians could dream too.

But fine, supposing the US never brought any revolutions to Iraq, and supposing these recent winds of change were the lone work of Twitter and Wikileaks. In this case, those who blushed before will have to blush again if they say that the shimmering river of the Jasmine Revolution would now be flowing with promise into Mesopotamia: Oh, there would be a revolution all right.

It was strange that people who favored an international military intervention to remove Saddam Hussein from power in 2003 were branded as naïve idealists (to put it most charitably). “You break it, you own it,” said the wise realists. But the US had broken Iraq long ago when the CIA helped Saddam take power, and Saddam’s brutalization of Iraqis had made a future Shia-Sunni kill-fest an irrevocable date on Iraq’s calendar. As Christopher Hitchens predicted in 2002, amid invasion doubts:

the implosion of the Saddam Hussein regime is coming anyway. It’s coming like Christmas. We’re very soon to be faced whatever we do with all the ghastly consequences of a post-Saddam Iraq, which will include indeed Sunni-Shia rivaly, other regional rivalries, the possible intervention of neighboring countries, revenge killing, innumerable unpleasant possibilities.

The real question was not whether a revolution was coming, but whether, when it came, Saddam’s Republican Guard would still have access to the chemical weapons and attack helicopters that they were so experienced in using.

And now, as the Arab League approves a no-fly zone over Libya, where the Egyptian rebels’ caches of tear gas antidotes and muffler plugs will not do, one wonders: where was the righteous Arab League hiding when the US was enforcing a unilateral no-fly zone over parts of Iraq for the decade preceding the invasion. And as Europeans demand a no-drive zone in Libya: is there not a profitable oil-for-food program in Libya that’s worth protecting again? And as Colonel Qaddafi shows “no mercy” to the rebels: what if Qaddafi had not been “nervous” enough about Bush to hand over his chemical weapons stash? And as revolution spreads throughout the region: if Saddam were still in power, who thinks Iraqis would be too passive to take their chance? Who thinks Saddam would let them? And who thinks Iraqis would let the West come anywhere close to their rescue after two decades of European parliamentarians profiting off of their misery, and Americans preaching freedom but ignoring the concentration camp of Iraq?

There has long been a rot in Arab society, and it gave birth to 9/11. “This rot weighs on the world,” Iraqi-born professor Kanan Makiya said. It is a rot that limited Arab revolutions to either vicious coups or Islamist uprisings. But the war in Iraq offered a precedent for a new kind of revolution, “that could spread to other authoritarian governments.” Lebanon followed, and now the region. Today’s is a revolution “preannounced” indeed.

(Photos courtesy of The Founders' Porch)

Poppies and Pomegranates in Kandahar

As goes Kandahar Province, so goes Afghanistan. And as go the “paradoxes” of counterinsurgency operations – as General David Petraeus’ field manual calls the shifty phantoms that have found a fine haunt in the pomegranate orchards of Kandahar’s Arghandab River Valley – so goes the war. Last October, as American bombs fell on the sleepy village of Tarok Kolache – an orphaned ghost town under the tenancy of IED-sewing Taliban – commanding officer Lieutenant Colonel David Flynn cringed: “not because I cared about the enemy we were killing or the HME destroyed,” he said, “but I knew the reconstruction would consume the remainder of my deployed life.”

Indeed, with all the mosque groundbreakings and village ribbon-cuttings in the past month alone, reconstruction is consuming Arghandab itself. What is especially encouraging is the US army’s decentralized Hayekian approach: village shurahs, local Afghan National Security Force commanders, the district governor, the District Stabilization Team, and civilian assistance groups are carrying out their respective duties, with President Karzai’s network pointedly uninvited (though his taxmen are surely salivating at the opportunities). The pomegranate villages may not yet have been destroyed in vain.

But even as Arghandabers chisel out compensation with municipal flare, the paradox of the pomegranate raps on: Try as they might to compensate the farmer whose few mangled trees amounted to his living, ISAF’s orchard renovations and USAID’s energy Americana solar panel schemes will never compete on the market economy of Kandahar’s rural badlands. For here, in the land of Plan B “alternative livelihoods,” the Taliban cash cropper with grade-A opium poppy is king.

With poppy-based opium funding all evils in Afghanistan – from Taliban payrolls to the corruption in the Afghan Ministry of Counternarcotics itself – it is no wonder that the US allotted over $2 billion between 2005 and 2010 to stem narcotics activities in Afghanistan, according to last year’s Government Accountability Office report. Working in the shadows of the forgotten war within the forgotten war, the Drug Enforcement Agency (DEA), Britain's Serious Organized Crimes Agency, and the Afghan-led Major Crimes Task Force routinely score operational successes, including last October’s DEA-Russia co-nabbing of more than $60 million worth of heroin in raids on just four drug labs in northeastern Afghanistan.

Yet now in its 10^th year, the war on opium poppy is failing. The UN Office on Drugs and Crime’s December “Afghanistan Opium Survey” admitted “cause for concern” in the self-perpetuating cycle of insecurity and opium price rises. Indeed, the value of Afghan opium rose 164% in 2010 on the wings of a poppy blight, wheat drought, and rising violence. A January Washington Post article headlined “Success of Afghan drug war is waning” pointed out that more and more Afghan farmers are turning to opium poppy cultivation as an economic necessity, often paying protection taxes to the Taliban. “Most of the trafficking we see is in Kandahar,” said anti-narcotics police head Bazz Mohammed Ahmadi, “and we have no control there.”

Such dourness is strange in the context of recent Afghanistan war assessments. Afghanistan expert Ahmed Rashid suggested last November that the Taliban, far from content with their lucrative opium monopoly, are “exhausted by the war” and “would like to see peace.” The December “Responsible Transition” report by Andrew Exum and Lieutenant General (Ret.) David W. Barno – said to have strong influence on President Obama’s Afghanistan strategy – claims to outline the path to a “more sustainable U.S. and allied presence,” without ever mentioning poppy.

In Arghandab, however, where the only peace the Taliban would like to see is the peace of neo-Deobandi Shariah law, and the Taliban-warlord opium monopoly rivals the importance of Soviet-era Stinger missiles, poppy-free reconstruction plods ahead. The buzz is “alternative livelihoods,” like pomegranates, wheat, and saffron –but all are less profitable alternatives to the one crop capable of riding out the snaps and spins of the country’s security maladies. Valiant are the Afghans who reject the Taliban’s promise of poppy farm protection, and instead receive death threats when seen waiting at the district center for their $170 pomegranate tree compensation.

The poppy paradox is simple: a licensed poppy-for-medicine economy would increase poppy supply, thereby decreasing opium prices. As incomes along the value chain rise for regular Afghans – i.e. the COIN center of gravity – the insurgency’s monopoly crumbles apart. Afghans, no longer settling for “alternative” livelihoods, can now pursue “preferred” livelihoods, with no more need for Taliban protection. As the insurgency shrivels, security increases, and Afghan farmers now have the time, money, and certainty to invest in those same trusty pomegranates.

The questions beg ironies: Will licit poppy production increase the opium supply? In fact, as repeated International Council on Security and Development studies show, a poppy-for-morphine program would undercut the comparative advantage of the opium trade, diverting poppy to the licit medical market. As it is, even wounded Afghan soldiers are lucky to receive morphine, with the Army Surgeon General removed last month for siphoning off $42 million in army medicines; Will coalition partners approve? Actually, the US already buys poppy-for-morphine from Turkey and Australia, so any objections are self-serving; Will the program flop amid Afghanistan’s lawlessness? The criminal patronage networks and the Taliban already grow poppy, and only stand to lose when competitors sprout up in law-abiding pockets of the country.

Kandahar’s unusually “kinetic” winter, including the assassination of the deputy governor this week, is likely an indicator of an insurgency that feels threatened by ISAF’s population-centric reconstruction efforts, particularly in Arghandab. This makes the counter-productiveness of Afghanistan’s poppy policy all the more regretful. Reconstruction may consume the rest of the deployed life of the soldiers of Flynn's 1-320^th, and wisely so. But until such reconstruction includes mention of poppy, soldiers will continue to spend their lives deployed in Afghanistan indeed.

(Photos courtesy of Founders' Porch)

Statism fails in Afghanistan, too

At last weekend's grand Lisbon summoning of coalition commanders in Afghanistan, "progress" was the magic word. Is there enough progress to keep progressing? You see, sir, if you look at the metrics of progress...

The war in Afghanistan is a counterinsurgency (you might recall) so the only progress that really matters is the "people" progress. The NATO inquisitees probably pointed to a recently released poll showing that the percentage of Afghan people who report having "no sympathy at all for the insurgency" has risen from 36 to 55 this year. Yet in this time-warped land of peculiar values, we ought to be careful how we poll the people progress.

For in truth, one man's insurgent (to parallel the old axiom) may be another man's speed-dial godfather. This Alikozai village's Takfiri enemy may be that Ghilzai village's community chest, doling out goodies with the government's consent. Do not think the government of the Islamic Republic of Afghanistan or its security apparatus is exempt from such ambiguities.

And what's an Afghan fellow to say? The minister of the Hajj steals from the hajjis. The chairman of Kabul Bank, a World Series of Poker champion, gambles away depositors' livelihoods. The village teacher takes bribes from students to fix grades and distribute books. And we, the International Security Assistance Force, want to know how Afghans feel about the "insurgents"?

A counterinsurgency strategy in Afghanistan that focuses its metrics for "progress" on the government, rather than the people, will fail. "President Bush took his eye off of the ball in Afghanistan," goes the vague metaphor. But what is far more consequential is that we have misidentified the ball altogether. Brookings Institution scholar Michael O'Hanlon, for example, returned from an Afghanistan trip with glad tidings last month (at a time of record U.S. casualties in the nearly 10-year-old war). "Progress has been rapid this year," he wrote. He emphasized training and partnership with the Afghan government's security forces as the golden metric. The tripling of trainers, the doubling of security forces' pay and the high partnership rates signaled success.

But kick the capacity-industrial complex for a minute and think like an Afghan: From the viewpoint of, say, Paktiyans forced to pay off the chief of police, what's so special about increasing the pay of thugs? Or about the Americans partnering with the police? "The Americans are complicit with the corrupt bastards at record levels? Splendid."

The problem here is much more disturbing than "lack of capacity." You have heard that Afghanistan is hopelessly decentralized, too tribal and geographically divided to yield to higher powers. Quite the contrary: In the wake of the Kabul Bank run, the acquittal and protection of Afghanistan's slimiest "civil servants" (such as Hamid Karzai appointee Muhammad Zia Salehi), massive government land grabs and increasing signs of government profiting off of the drug trade, it is tragically plain that Afghanistan is indeed united to excess under an oligarchy of warlords and their patrons.

That President Karzai, himself a key underwriter of these networks of criminal profiteering, prefers speeding up the security-force buddy-buddying and transfer of authority should raise suspicions. Getting to the bottom if it: In Afghanistan, when you have a problem, it doesn't really matter what the famed local tribal council reckons. What matters is whether you stand in the personal favor of powerful men like Ahmed Wali Karzai, the president's brother. Indeed, the more we fuss over Afghanistan's supposed decentralized capacity, the more a few powerful personalities deepen their centralized authority.

But what did we expect? Perhaps we have grown insecure when it comes to recalling the lessons of our own republic - our Tocquevillian emphasis on solving problems through local civil society, our mistrust in central government's ability to distribute gobs of money. Still, even our statist naivete does not excuse President Karzai's recent spout of relativism on taking cash from Iran. "We are grateful for the Iranian help in this regard. The United States is doing the same thing, they're providing cash to some of our offices." Many apologies to his excellency, but until Iran sacrifices thousands of its finest for the Afghan cause, he would be well-advised to get off it. Meanwhile, we would be wise to swallow our "good war" pride and admit that it is this - the internationally agreed-upon, soft power-centric war - and not Iraq that truly risks spiraling into the gleeful hands of the Iranians and the Shariah fundamentalists.

So what is the solution? Tempting as it is to say there is not one, the solution starts with admitting that touting government progress is not the solution. The solution will be measured in people progress: To what extent are the Afghan people making local decisions, rather than USAID money-baggers with their energy Americana wind-farm schemes? How are Afghans being empowered and not the Karzai family criminal syndicate?

At his former command in Iraq, coalition commander Gen. David H. Petraeus used to inquire cryptically: "Tell me how this ends." Afghanistan is not such a riddle: We either prioritize people progress - and not, say, institutional capacity - or we watch the Taliban turn Kabul's stadiums from soccer fields back into execution chambers. With a record 83 percent of Afghan adults backing negotiations with armed, anti-government groups, the tipping point is palpable. It's best that we snap out of our sleepwalking quickly.

(Photos courtesy of Founders' Porch)

Dancing with Hezbollah

A review of Michael Young's "The Ghost's of Martyrs Square: An Eyewitness Account of Lebanon's Life Struggle "

With the malady of a nuclear armed Islamic Republic of Iran looming on the 2011 horizon (to take the low end of Secretary of Defense Robert Gates’ estimate), there is a stubborn ontology afflicting both the “bomb Iran” and the “containment” strategies for dealing with the Iranian nuclear program: Both put the US and Israel in a dangerous spiral towards confrontation with Iran’s Lebanese proxy Hezbollah, the “most technically-capable terrorist group in the world,” according to the State Department. Bomb Iran’s nuclear reactors, and Hezbollah will attack Israel with three times its 2006 rocket supply. Opt for containment, and brace for a Hezbollah theocracy-within-a-state with startling leverage.

General James Mattis walked back this cat in his July CENTCOM confirmation hearing, advocating a boost to Lebanese Armed Forces (LAF) funding, “to balance the influence of Syria and Hezbollah.” Yet just days later, an Israeli battalion commander was fatally sniped not by Hezbollah, but by the LAF. And after the clash, Lebanese MPs were inviting Hezbollah to join the LAF’s resistance to Israeli aggression.

What is this strange country, Lebanon? Who are the Lebanese? What will we wish we had known about Hezbollah’s Lebanese hosts when the inevitable happens in Iran?

Michael Young gives us some of the answers before we ask the questions. In a country where memory is bad manners, Young turns his own memories of assassinated friends and humbled dreams into an emotional tale of Lebanon’s meanderings through politics and war since 2005. Lebanon has spent the last five years delaying the answers of the UN-backed Special Tribunal for Lebanon investigating the February 2005 assassination of former Prime Minister Rafik Hariri. But as the Iran showdown nears, the world needs answers quickly. What is the secret to a stable Lebanon? What can be done about Hezbollah? Where does Lebanon start and Syria and Iran end? The Lebanese prefer to forget, but Americans, fond memorizers of their own republic’s founding, would do well to learn.

The good news, Young argues, is that Lebanon’s perplexity is a function of its liberalism. Whereas the region’s autocrats are easy to read, Lebanon thrashes around with a “paradoxical” liberalism, in which “illiberal institutions tend to cancel each other out in the shadow of a sectarian system that makes the religious communities and sects more powerful than the state – to me, the main barrier to personal freedom in the Middle East.” Lebanese politics, in other words, may be the haunt of swindlers and their stomach churning deals with devils. But there is an invisible hand at work here: Yes, it was this hand that ferried the Aounists, for example, away from their opposition to Syrian chauvinism. But it is the same hand that slaps away totalitarian creepings of all confessions.

Ambition counteracting ambition, faction offsetting faction? Young, a self-described “American libertarian” and contributor to Reason magazine, must know his American audience will not be able to help but fancy him some sort of Lebanese James Madison. Why not embrace the role and invoke the Federalist Papers? He has said “I did not set out to write a political science text,” but his book’s republican theme does beg the slightest tipping of his hat to the American constitution. Or perhaps a bow to Alexis de Tocqueville, who praised the “happy land” of American federalism, “where man’s vices are almost as useful to society as his virtues!” and warned “If freedom is lost in America, that will be due to the omnipotence of the majority.”

But this is a book about Lebanon, not America, and therein lays the bad news: Whatever the lure of internal political theories, Lebanon is a small state in a shady neighborhood, where the invisible hand is no match for the foreign hand. Young describes a dazed Lebanon in the fresh ruins of “Pax Syriana.” He invites the reader to join him in marveling over Syrian President Bashir al Assad’s shameless threats to “break Lebanon” – even, in so many words, to the Secretary General of the United Nations. And he reels in the fables of the idolized Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah, who, it turns out, is only as great as his Iranian patrons wish. For even Hezbollah cannot resist “the ease with which outsiders have been able to exploit Lebanon’s divisions to assert their power over the country.”

Would that it were so “easy,” America’s diplomats will say. Young’s book comes at a time of crisis for US policy towards Lebanon and its Syrian and Iranian puppeteers. President Obama’s validation of the “Islamic Republic” and appointment of an ambassador to Syria have made for a one-sided affair. As American power in the region wanes with a withdrawal of US troops from Iraq, so too does the “Bush-era fervor” of the Lebanese in the face of Syrian hegemony. That phrase will strike many American readers as ironic. But Young, who supported the Iraq War, gives President Bush his due: “the Lebanese, like the Iraqis, used America to help create a new order – whether America was appreciated or not, thanked or not.” Here he echoes another Lebanese writer, with whom he shares a poetically wistful way of historiography. Fouad Ajami, author of “The Foreigner’s Gift,” a story of Americans in post-Saddam Iraq, might have added the Lebanese to the list of that gift’s recipients. Then again, perhaps not, given the “Independence Intifada’s” flickering out amidst the cheers of “condescending and deterministic” Western elites, who say “what Arab societies needed was the time to develop democratic habits.”

Indeed, the sluggish STL, which Young has probed extensively as an editor for the Beirut-based Daily Star, has bought five years. Only upon Nasrallah’s August announcement of “evidence” of Israeli involvement in the assassination – which Young’s account of Syrian meddling with the STL quickly dispels – has the STL indicated urgency. Detliv Mehlis, the first commissioner of the UN investigation and the subject of trendy “I love Mehlis” t-shirts roaming Beirut, is a tragic hero in Young’s story; one who tried to break the memory taboos, but failed. In another parallel to Iraq, just as the international community preferred the time-buying of Hans Blix to the proven inspection record of Rolf Ekeus, so too is the UN content to let Mehlis’ efforts go to waste under the failed tenures of Serge Brammertz and Daniel Bellemare. For the STL and the sectarian Lebanese system, Young writes, “Hariri was a page best turned.”

The Hezbollization of Lebanon and its army, however, is a page that the world cannot turn. What is the Lebanese Army? Young knows its dance. In the weeks after Hariri’s assassination when the LAF deployed with the delicate task of quelling popular protests, Young and fellow-protestors refused to yield: “the soldiers murmured to us to push, because the quicker we pushed, the quicker the absurdity would end for them. And as we pushed, they gave way, making it seem like a struggle.” UNIFL may be forgiven for its clumsy rendition of the same dance last month, when it allowed a Hezbollah-friendly south Lebanese village to disarm it and smash its vehicles. But the August 3 border clash indicates the army’s dance may be over.

Young is not immune from Lebanon’s selective amnesia. Where in his book is the Lebanon where the most common reaction to seeing Israeli civilian casualties, according to Zogby’s 2010 poll, is “Israelis brought it upon themselves,” “empathy” not even registering a percentage? And where is the Beirut that closed the shutters as journalist Christopher Hitchens was nearly beaten to death last year for defacing a swastika? All in all, though, Young sees Lebanon for the liberal wonder on a rough street that it is. We are lucky to have Young’s account to guide us through this confusing country, with little time to spare before the dark curfews return.

The Othello Element

What is the Tea Party? Why, it’s elementary. There is the “radical element,” everyone knows. And there is the “racist element,” which the “radical” element claims is just a “fringe” element, but was nevertheless condemned by a majority of NAACP elements. Lesser known is the “Tea Party” element, which -- get this -- actually believes in the Tea Party. The NAACP’s smears have taught this fringe something of the anguish of Shakespeare’s Othello: When he, too, was told his love was not pure, he replied:

Villain, be sure thou prove my love a whore…
Her name, that was as fresh as Dian’s visage,
Is now begrimed and black as mine own face…
If thou dost slander her and torture me,
Thou hadst been better have been born a dog

Perhaps the NAACP risks less accountability if in error, but let’s have it: does the begrimed Tea Party merit its villains' claims?

Representative John Lewis claimed he was repeatedly called the “N word” on Capitol Hill last March, but he lacked something the ancient courts of Othello’s Venice called “proof.” After extensive googling I found some photos of people holding signs (supposedly at Tea Party rallies) depicting the President as a monkey -- though none with as much success as the Minneapolis Star Tribune’s cartoons of the previous President. And I found one picture of a loser holding an “N word” sign. But dost a few losers maketh thine love a whore? I happen to subscribe to the “Tea Party” element’s propaganda outlets -- my favorite being The Jason Lewis Show -- and I have yet to break any racist code.

And let’s not deny the liberal elements their due. “Barack the Magic Negro,” Barack the “light-skinned” man without a “negro dialect,” and Barack the “clean and articulate” black man were epithets from the Left. New York Times writer Matt Bai says there is a “generational divide” in the Tea Party, between the racist “older” element, and the naïve “younger” element. But it was the Left that profited from its own “generational divide” when it slandered Tea Partiers as “Tea-baggers” -- a term Bill Burton, spokesman for a White House full of twenty-somethings that know better, claimed was not derogatory.

Still, what’s so wrong with telling the Tea Party to “expel the bigots and racists in your ranks,” however few they may be? By all means, expel away. But assuming our guiding principle is contempt of all bigotry in all ranks, there are a few elements in a certain group of 1.3 billion that might complicate the expulsion’s logistics.

And let’s nix right now the idea that 1.3 billion Muslims get immunity from standards of political decency because their’s is a religion. (That’s precisely the problem, as when Othello’s lieutenant rebuts a Senator’s “Thou art a villain” crack: “Thou art -- a Senator”). A 2008 Gallup poll showed that “substantial majorities” of Muslims in Muslim-majority countries favor Sharia legislation. And it’s gross negligence to say they lack the Tea Party’s influence, thus owing less public accountability: It’s not Tea Partiers yelling “allah akbar” and pushing the IED detonator as American soldiers deliver aid in Afghanistan. Most of the American defense budget is a political calculation based on “elements” of Islam. So yes, expel away.

And the expulsion of bigots in Muslim ranks should be easier, because whereas the Tea Partiers at least have a core of noble classical liberalism to rest claims of innocence on, Muslims have the Koran. Anyone that praises the Koran as the best book ever written, as all Muslims do, owes you an explanation. It takes a bold imagination to read the Koran and not conclude it is hateful, fearful, and ugly. Its bigotry is of the misogynistic and xenophobic brand. Let’s just say it’s not a book you would let a child read, as almost every other paragraph has a chilling voice demanding “dread me,” or reminding the reader of the bloody punishment that awaits the unsure. Better that thou hadst been born a dog, indeed, than get your face scalded for eternity.

But don’t judge a book by its contents. Look at what Muslims actually do and think. One word: dhimmi. What's that? Just like the old poker saying, if you don’t know who it is, it’s probably you. Another word: Jews. Ninety percent of Middle Easterners view them “unfavorably.” 78% of Pakistanis and 74% of Indonesians. Gee, what could these people have in common that makes them all so bigoted? And a final word: jihad. Or man-caused disaster, or ADD or whatever we call it nowadays. It happens every day, and its victims are chosen for their beliefs. It’s bigotry by definition.

So where proportion and principle are concerned, the NAACP may be biting off more bigotry than it can chew. It’s easy to tell the Tea Party to expel its bigots, because there aren’t many to begin with. Do we have the patience to ask Islam to expel its inherent bigotry? Do we have the defense budget? These types of questions are mostly frivolous where the “begrimed” Tea Party is concerned, but they are horribly pertinent in Kandahar, Afghanistan and, more unexpectedly, Kampala, Uganda. No doubt Islam has its fair Othello’s too: let this radical element be the first to seek the villain’s proof.

Freedom and the Moral Imperative

In a piece published by Forbes today, the writer poses an enormously important question: what are we to do about the economy? But he frames the debate in a meaningful way. Typically, pundits and “academics” (I use the word loosely to describe the delusional Paul Krugman) spend their ink debating the merits of a centrally-planned, welfare state versus the laissez-faire, market mechanism for creating wealth in our economy.

The thing I found refreshing about this piece is that it transcends that argument, as we ought to as citizens. It is clear to both me and the author that central planning, government intervention and manipulation, and the redistribution of wealth result in misery. It has been discredited in theory and practice countless times. The government cannot create wealth; at its best it can only protect it.

I have no doubt that more freedom, the laissez-faire, market-driven society produces more wealth. But, the author expresses a disbelief that uninhibited people left to do whatever their appetites and lusts drive them to do will create a stable society. His skepticism is well founded. Anarchy is no solution to a bloated and burdensome government.

In sum, when the government controls us and our economy it results in abuse, repression, stifled freedom and ultimately those in government, the empowered, dominating the weak. If we are left completely uninhibited, unchecked, it results in wanton orgies of consumer self-gratification, greed, dishonesty, and the powerful dominating the weak.

So what are we to do? We cannot embrace the domination of the government over its citizens. Nor can we condone the lawlessness of anarchy. The only hope is what the Founders of this nation set out to do hundreds of years ago. These United States are an experiment in self government. We must govern ourselves first. The primacy of restraint is vested in the individual. And how do we become self governing? The natural state of human liberty must be tempered by man’s outright embrace of a moral code. It is imperative.

Ultimately, the real root of the economic problems we face, the real crises is found in our moral, ethical, and social failures as a nation. We have a moral crisis ten times the size of the economic malaise.

We have broken homes and families and scratch our heads wondering why our educational system lacks support. We have built and entitlement society, where wealth isn’t earned, it’s a right, and wonder why people are greedy. We tell people it is just fine to murder their unborn children if their childhood would be inconvenient (92% of women cite “social” or “other” as the most important reason they terminated the pregnancy, 25% say they’re just not “ready”) to the parent, and can’t figure out why people are selfish. We have a government that forcibly steals from the wealthy to buy the votes of the poor, and wonder why charity suffers. We have eviscerated the moral authority of the Church, mocked and ridiculed people of faith, and wonder why people don’t behave ethically anymore. Moral relativism pervades our society today.

This nation has spent the past 50 years divorcing and divesting itself in the most valuable resource a capitalist, free market system has: the morals of the people living in the society. Until we embrace moral behavior, unless we resuscitate the social mores that once tempered lives of the citizens, people in this country will cease to be free.

Self government is the answer. The state should not be forced to dictate my charitable giving, my light bulb usage, or the distribution of economic resources. We must make the right choice individually. If we fail to answer the author’s question we will be a nation of slaves: whether it is an individual without morals, enslaved by their own intemperate lusts and desires for wealth power, or we are dominated by an oppressive government, the result is the same. Freedom dies and the experiment in self government expires in a tragic end.