Finding lessons in an explosive region Message-ID: <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> User-Agent: eGroups-EW/0.82 X-Mailer: Yahoo Groups Message Poster X-Originating-IP: 66.94.237.38 X-eGroups-Msg-Info: 1:12:0 X-Yahoo-Post-IP: 68.100.205.147 From: "David Bier" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> X-Yahoo-Profile: bafsllc Sender: [email protected] MIME-Version: 1.0 Mailing-List: list [email protected]; contact [EMAIL PROTECTED] Delivered-To: mailing list [email protected] List-Id: <osint.yahoogroups.com> Precedence: bulk List-Unsubscribe: <mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]> Date: Mon, 25 Apr 2005 22:44:30 -0000 Subject: [osint] Reply-To: [email protected] Content-Type: text/plain; charset=ISO-8859-1 Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit
http://www.mlive.com/entertainment/aanews/index.ssf?/base/features-0/11143375447381.xml Finding lessons in an explosive region A conversation with newsman, Mideast expert Lawrence Pintak Sunday, April 24, 2005BY ANNE RUETER News Staff Reporter Like a fair number of scholars at the University of Michigan, Lawrence Pintak is an avid Mideast watcher. Between classes as a visiting lecturer and professor, he scans stories from half a dozen international news sources online each day. One site he's sure to check daily is the Beirut Daily Star, where he can read stories like "Lebanon PM Hopes to Get Polls Back on Track," about preparations for a crucial election in May, or "Coffins on wheels put public safety at risk," about Lebanon's unscrupulous dealers who pass off as used cars wrecked, hastily patched-up vehicles imported from more affluent countries. What's happening in Beirut is not a purely academic matter for Pintak: As a CBS News Mideast correspondent in Beirut in the early 1980s, he covered Lebanon's chaotic civil war, including the 1983 suicide truck bombing of barracks in Beirut in which more than 200 U.S. Marines died. He brought American TV viewers scenes of a city under siege by opposing factions of Christians, Islamic Shiites, Druze and others, some 25 militias in all, in many cases financed by outside nations. Lebanon is a lesson book, Pintak says, because the world saw the birth there of today's terrorist strategies in the region - suicide car bombings, assassinations - in the actions of Hezbollah. Pintak is able to read between the lines of today's stories from the Mideast with the eyes of one intimately acquainted with the political forces at work there. So we asked him to help us read between the lines too, to understand more deeply what forces are at work in Lebanon, Iraq, Iran, Israel and other volatile parts of the Mideast. Here is Pintak's take on some of the situations in the Mideast: Iran Three years ago, there was a significant liberalization movement there. Clerics began to have less power. But then, The U.S. war in Iraq "played into Iran's hands." The war shifted public concern in Iran to an external enemy, which traditionally unifies a nation. Anti-reform forces consolidated power and could crack down on the reform movement. Iran benefited two ways from the war: It got rid of its biggest enemy, Iraq, and U.S. forces got bogged down in Iraq, so the United States now poses less of a threat to Iran. In the current debate between the United States and European nations over how to handle Iran's nuclear capability, he says, "Our rhetorical bluster is further enabling them (the conservative forces in Iran) to consolidate their position." They know the United States can do little to interfere. Al-Qaida With this Iran situation as a backdrop, he sketches out one nightmare scenario: Osama bin Laden, who still has some operational capacity, "might carry out another attack in the United States, with Iran's fingerprints on it." The United States would be likely to blame an arm of Hezbollah based in Iran known to currently engage in terrorist tactics. Then, Pintak speculates, the United States could strike back at Iran, and fuel more hatred. That would likely have the unfortunate effect of halting any reconsideration of attitudes toward America going on now in the Mideast. Iraq "The danger in Iraq is the splintering." He doesn't see a breakup as inevitable, despite tensions among Shiites, Kurds and Sunnis over control of the country's rich oil reserves. For now, he says, respected moderate Shiite cleric Ali Husseini al-Sistani keeps in check more radical Shiites forces in Iraq, which renewed their calls for immediate U.S. troop withdrawal earlier this month on the second anniversary of the pulling down of Saddam Hussein's statue in a Baghdad square. He sees a possible future Iraq in which "everybody settles into a tolerance of each other." But, he says, "If Sistani gets assassinated, all bets are off. He's the reason we don't have anti-American violence (in Iraq) right now." He calls radical Shiites like those led by rebel cleric Muktada al-Sadr "the wild card" in Iraqi politics. Pintak sees many parallels between the divided ethnic and religious groups in Iraq today and the more volatile mix of groups with opposing aims that caused civil war and chaos in Lebanon in the 1970s and 1980s. "The difference (in Iraq) is, you have a Shiite majority, and their interest is to keep stability." On the other hand, oil wealth wasn't at stake in Lebanon, but is a "huge factor" in Iraq's internal tensions, he says. Will the present balance among Shiites, Sunnis and Kurds hold? "I think we're not going to know for a long time, because any government they put together now is going to be unstable." Pintak thinks a significant withdrawal of U.S. troops is unlikely in the near future. If the United States pulls troops out suddenly, "you send all the messages about the U.S. not being willing to incur a high body count ." What's more, he argues, "You create truly a cauldron of terrorism." The majority Shiites continue to be under pressure from Sunni insurgents, "so they have a need for U.S. forces to defend them." Lebanon Pintak thinks there could be a good turn of events here. A new government needs to be put in place in elections slated for May, and Syrian troops will pull out. He says the United States is misguided if it views Hezbollah as a force supporting Syria. Hezbollah does not necessarily want Syrian troops to stay, despite the counterdemonstrations it organized after the recent push by other Lebanese to get Syrian troops out of their country. But if the United States or Israel were to assassinate a Hezbollah leader? "All bets are off," he says. U.S. leaders are naive, he says, in their traditional thinking about Hezbollah as a primarily terrorist organization - it has become primarily political in Lebanon - and in their failure to see its broader links to other Shiites peoples in the region. Washington promised Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon that Hezbollah would be our target in a second wave in the war on terror. But if we struck Hezbollah, we would inflame the Shiite world, including Shiites insurgents in Iraq, he says. "The problem isn't Hezbollah. It's the intrinsic linkage between Lebanese Shia, Iraqi Shia and Iranian Shia the clerics in all three are all family." Another hunch: Pintak doesn't think Syria was behind the assassination of Lebanese former Prime Minister Rafik Hariri, as many Lebanese believe. Rather, he suspects anti-Syria internal elements in Lebanon were behind it. The Israeli-Palestinian conflict With the revival of peace talks, "It's definitely moving in the right direction," Pintak says. Like other Mideast watchers, he thinks Arafat's death was key before both sides could begin to talk again. With recent assassinations of Hamas leaders, Israel has damaged the Hamas infrastructure, thereby making the Palestinian Authority stronger. The acts against Hamas have, though, radicalized Palestinians. On stirrings of democracy around the Mideast "You can't make a strong argument that (the push for democracy) is happening because we invaded Iraq. But it is happening because the U.S. is talking about democracy." Another factor is crucial, and often overlooked in the West: "You cannot overstate the degree to which all of this is connected to the revolution in media in the Arab world.... The raison d'etre (of Al Jazeera) is democracy in the Arab world." People in Morocco are hearing Saudi exiles and Sharon interviewed on TV. TV brought awareness of the Orange Revolution in the Ukraine. That emboldened Lebanese working for change. Pintak says Americans fail to understand why many people in Mideast nations feel such great animosity toward the United States. "They hate us because we're seen as an imperial power through our use of arms, and through economic hegemony." He's writing a book now on what he describes as "the disconnect of world views between the U.S., particularly our leaders in Washington, and the rest of the world, particularly the Muslim world." Reporter Anne Rueter can be reached at (734) 994-6759 or [EMAIL PROTECTED] ------------------------ Yahoo! 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