Dispatches

Of Turbans and Neckties : Why Past Defines Present /

In a profession that treasures its heroes, ask any correspondent about Kif, John Kifner of the New York Times. After editing his Williams College paper, he joined the Times as a copy boy in 1963 and badgered his bosses for reporting assignments. Soon, he was a star. With ingenuity, endless energy, and his fabled war bag always packed by the door, he moves at warp speed. An impish grin and persistence win over sources. A mastery of world realities underlies his work. Mostly, Kif is a reporter’s reporter, who knows the value of seeing the story up close. He belongs to a breed that recognizes its own. Late one night on a train from Bucharest, after covering Nicolae Ceausescu’s fall, he watched a newsmagazine correspondent pad to the wash room with slippers, pajamas, robe, and toothbrush glass. “That guy,” he remarked with a laugh to a colleague sharing the Scotch, “is going to be an editor.”

It was the winter of 1979, and Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini had just arrived back in Iran, overthrowing America’s most important client in the world, Shah of Shahs, Mohammed Reza Paleveh, King of Kings, Light of the Aryans and guardian of a huge chunk of the world’s oil supply. I had just arrived too, possibly the greenest freshly minted foreign correspondent ever, having never been outside America, unless you counted a small race riot in Bermuda.

I awoke one morning to the news that some big ayatollah had been whacked, gunned down from the jump seat of a motorcycle. And not just any ayatollah; it was Khomeini’s teacher. (Khomeini had a teacher? Who knew?) The immediate conventional assumption blamed disgruntled agents of the former Shah’s dreaded secret police, the SAVAK.

Okay, I thought, this is a second-day homicide story, and this I knew how to do. I had translators go through the Farsi newspapers to locate the scene of the crime. No luck. Well, what hospital pronounced him dead? Off to the hospital to find the doctor and ambulance crew that picked him up. Got a street intersection? We find the crime scene, and what a scene.

The cloth of the ayatollah’s turban is coiled in the gutter, his glasses upside down on top of it with a sign reading, “Congratulations, Teacher, on your martyrdom.” A crowd has gathered around. As I interview them, someone pushes forward a young boy, maybe 12, saying he knows what happened. He turns out to be a nephew of Mehdi Bazargan, prime minister of the provisional government which had the offices and regal tea sets of the former shah, but was, in fact, powerless. The slain ayatollah headed a secret group of clerics, the Council of the Islamic Revolution, which really ran things. The two had been holding a clandestine meeting at a house around the corner — the boy took us there — to work out an agreement on governing. My translators grinned. They knew we were onto a hot one.

Now for the cops. We find the nearest police station, and suddenly I feel like I am in familiar territory: a shabby room with a big high desk and a fat guy with sergeant’s stripes behind it. I tell my fixers to translate everything I say as idiomatically as possible.

“Where’s the squad?” He jerks his thumb upstairs. Good, detectives are usually on the second floor. Again familiar. Walls painted a sickly green, battered steel desks and filing cabinets. “Who caught the ayatollah job?” I was pointed toward an adjoining room.

Four guys in shirtsleeves sat around a table, pistols on their belts. One examined the brightly colored, shield-shaped NYPD press pass on a chain around my neck. “Not valid for parking purposes,” he read.

On the table was a notebook with a diagram of the crime scene, an X where the body was found, an arrow indicating the direction the motorcycle was traveling, a notation that the street light overhead had been shot out, probably earlier. I put my own notebook, with the identical diagram next to it. Cops and soldiers love maps and diagrams.

So what did they make of it?

They shifted in their seats, looking at each other uneasily. This was really going to be tough to explain to a dumb American. Finally one said, somewhat hesitantly, “This was done for a religious reason.”

Religious? Jeez, who could be more religious than Khomeini? Then it struck me. “You mean because the Hidden Imam hasn’t returned?” I asked.

Their faces brightened, and all four leaned forward eagerly to explain. An underground cult had vowed to assassinate the Shiite clerics leading the Islamic revolution. They believed the clerics had committed heresy by seizing temporal power instead of waiting for the return of the Mahdi, or redeemer, who was buried as a child in a cave 11 centuries before.

It was a helluva story. And no one else had it.

Americans are an ahistorical people. As a nation, we have little or no understanding of the grip that history holds on others in much of the world. In many countries, people are prisoners of centuries-old religious or ethnic grudges, captive to the blood that has been spilled before. Or, to turn George Santayana on his head, those who remember history are condemned to repeat it.

Our ignorance, I believe, is in large part because our ancestors came to be a nation of immigrants precisely to escape history in the form of religious, ethnic or economic persecution — or simply rigid social structures of the Old World. Think of the Pilgrims, the Catholics of Maryland, the Irish of the potato famine, refugees of the failed revolutions of 1848, Jews, and so many others seeking a better life. From the very beginning, the whole idea of America was a fresh start. At the outset, we were famously warned against “foreign entanglements” by our first national hero, George Washington.

“What then is the American, this new man,” St. John de Crevecoeur wrote in “Letter From an American Farmer” in 1782. “He is an American, who, leaving behind him all his ancient prejudices and manners receives new ones from the new mode of life he has embraced, the new government he obeys, and the new rank he holds. Here individuals of all races are melted into a new race of man, whose labors and posterity will one day cause great changes in the world.”

So what if he started out as a Frenchman?

(African Americans were hardly volunteers, having been brought here in slavery. Still, the great boxer Muhammed Ali, never loath to criticize America, when asked before his 1974 “Rumble in the Jungle” with George Foreman how he felt returning to his ancestral homeland, reportedly replied: “Thank God my great granddaddy caught the boat.”)

It is not that America is some kind of social Smoothie. Much of my early reporting was on ethnic strife, including the civil rights movement in the South, black riots in Harlem and Newark, Indians at Wounded Knee and the tumultuous events of 1968.

But that was our strife. I have to confess that I was a typical, ignorant American. I had never intended to be a foreign correspondent. The ‘60s and ‘70s were an exciting time to be a young reporter at home. I could tell you the details of police precincts or election districts in Chicago and Boston, where I was based as a national correspondent, but I spoke no languages and rarely, if ever, followed the foreign news.

Then came the Iranian revolution.

In early 1979, just as the shah — America’s policeman in the region — fled and Ayatollah Khomeini returned triumphantly from exile, I was given a temporary three-week assignment to help out our real foreign correspondents. It was a Friday. Be there on Monday.

I found Tehran on the map and was stunned to discover that it was east of Moscow. The main advice I got from an experienced colleague was to look for armed men on my way from the airport because when I got to the hotel the other reporters would ask where armed men were.

But I had extraordinary good fortune. The late Eqbal Ahmed, a brilliant Pakistani scholar of revolution, had become a friend when I covered the anti-war and radical movements. I told him of my problem (utter stupidity) and suggested maybe he knew something about this place I-ran, Persia. “I know much,” he said.

Eq bustled over, and we sat down with a yellow pad. He gave me an incredible lecture on the history of Iran and the nature of Shiite Islam. The religion, he explained, exists in a kind of adversarial relation to government. Its obsession with martyrdom stems from the death of its hero, Hussein, grandson of the Prophet Mohammed, slain at Karbala in 680, his head sent to his Sunni rival in Damascus. Shiites celebrate the anniversary of his death at Ashura by beating themselves with whips, chains and swords.

Perhaps most important is the concept of the Hidden Imam. This is the 12th leader of the Shiites, a messianic figure who went into a sort of suspended animation, called “occultation,” as a child in a cave during the ninth century and will one day return as the Mahdi in an end-of-days scenario in which all wrongs will finally be righted. No temporal government is really legitimate until the Mahdi returns. And, Eqbal added, be wary of believing what you are told; the doctrine of taqiyya, or dissimulation, makes it proper to lie to protect religion.

He went on and on as I frantically scribbled. I bought a rucksack of books on Iran and the Middle East, but Eq’s briefing was what mattered.

In Tehran, when I started mumbling about the Hidden Imam, my new colleagues looked at me like I was a crazed loon. Who ever heard of such a thing? They were experienced correspondents; some had covered Vietnam, and they got their briefings straight from the American embassy, which, of course, turned out to be probably the least informed place in town. (Months later, during the hostage crisis, a senior Carter administration official declared that hostage-takers holding the embassy were obviously “communists.” Who else could it be? But when I called the U.S. embassy number, someone answered, “Nest of Spies.” I was told no leaders could come to the phone because they were all at prayer.)

Since I didn’t know how to be a real foreign correspondent, I did the only thing I knew: work the streets like a police reporter. Local komitehs roamed about, bands of vigilantes enforcing Islamic standards, sometimes by pulling people out of cars and beating them. It was a sad day for the press corps when the komitehs stormed the hotel, closed the bars and destroyed what had been an excellent wine cellar.

It was quickly apparent that a widening power struggle divided the “Turbans,” the traditional clergy with their network of mosques that had become a kind of bureaucracy of the revolution, and the “Neckties,” a small group of more Westernized but still religious figures like Abolhassan Bani-Sadr, who would become the first, hapless, president and eventually be driven back into exile.

This struggle was at the heart of the embassy takeover and hostage impasse. Participants told me later it was planned only as a sit-in, and they were astonished at what they had wrought. The purpose was to protest a meeting between a “Necktie,” interim Prime Minister Mehdi Bazargan (a longtime democracy activist who was so devout he had a large black callus in the center of his forehead from striking it during prayers) and an American official. “Supping with the devil” was how they put it.

Thousands of Iranians turned out to surround the embassy to support the student protesters. It was almost impossible to overstate the hatred so many ordinary people had for the shah and, by extension, his American patrons. The takeover lasted 444 days. Both Iran and America were paralyzed. The “Turbans” used hostages as a hammer to pound the “Neckties.” It was clear to me that no matter how many secret negotiations were held with the official government the hostages would not be freed until the power struggle was resolved, and the “Turbans” had won. And so it was.

Iran taught me that a good foreign correspondent is simply a good reporter who learns deep respect for the way history, culture, and religion shape current events in ways that would be unimaginable in America. To most of us, every day is pretty much a new day. Not so in other lands where the past defines the present.

Later in Poland, when the Solidarity movement and reaction to martial law forced the first cracks in the Iron Curtain, I saw a similar phenomenon in completely different circumstances. The Roman Catholic Church was the symbol, protector, and mechanism of the opposition. It was a continuation of the church’s centuries-old role as the avatar of Polish nationalism, a belief that the Virgin Mary had personally intervened on several occasions to save Poland. The fight was not just against communism, but against Russia, whose czars had tried to encroach from the east and force conversion to the Orthodox Church.

(When I mentioned to Polish friends that this intertwining of religion and nationalism reminded me of Iran, they became quite indignant, but it was true.)

In one way or another, every assignment drove home the same points: No present exists without a past, and nothing is ever as simple as it may seem. This applies to every story, from Chile to China. But America’s dismissal of history has had especially dire consequences in the Middle East and South Asia, where I have worked since that temporary assignment in 1979.

When Soviet troops invaded Afghanistan, so did I. From the Iranian city of Mashad, I went to a border camp of black yurts commanded by a bushy bearded commander, a former major general in the Afghan air force. He loaned me three young gunmen and a stolen Russian truck, and we set off to find a mujaheddin guerrilla camp in the mountains.

Along the way we met an old man who told us how terrible it was when the communists came to his village.

I asked what they did, expecting a tale of atrocities.

“They tried to teach everybody to read,” he said. “Even the women and the old men.”

That’s awful, I agreed politely. What did you do?

“Well, of course, we killed them all,” he said. “Would you like to see their bones?”

From the beginning, it was plain that black-white perceptions in an ahistorical America could not explain Afghanistan. It might have been a clue to the Afghans’ fractious nature that Moscow first intervened because of a murderous feud between two factions of the ruling Communist Party whose main difference seemed to be that the masthead of one faction’s newspaper was red while the other’s was green.

I made three later trips with the mujaheddin from Peshawar, over the Khyber Pass in Pakistan. The United States and Saudi Arabia gave millions to seven main mujahedddin factions fighting the Soviets, and the Saudis set up madrasas along the border that churned out future jihadis. Money was channeled through Pakistan’s Inter-Services Intelligence agency (ISI), which gave the biggest share to the most virulent anti-Western leader, Gulbuddin Hektmatyar, who hoarded it for an inevitable fight among the factions. When America lost interest in the Afghans descent to anarchy, the ISI stepped back in to help organize the Taliban. This, in intelligence circles, is blowback.

I got an early taste of the fierce anti-Americanism of Bin Laden’s Arab fighters. I was walking one evening with the Afghan mujaheddin commander besieging Jalalabad when a convoy of uniformed Arabs in trucks and even a tank passed us. They began shouting angrily. What were they saying? I asked.

“Why don’t you kill that infidel?” he replied.

And what did you tell them? I wondered.

“I told them, ‘I can’t,’ the commander replied. “He’s my guest,’” the commander replied. Pushtunwali, the code of the Pushtuns, prevailed.

After the Soviets left Afghanistan, and the Evil Empire collapsed, Yugoslavia fell apart. Again, with no grasp of history, Americans didn’t get it. In fact, the Balkan implosion was like watching a movie in which scientists find a monster frozen in an iceberg; when they thaw it out all the old nastiness erupts. Particularly in Serbia, memories go back far beyond last century’s wars.

To make sense of events, you had to understand not only the interwar period but also history dating back centuries. And you had to be careful. Some reporters covering the Balkans leaned heavily on Rebecca West’s massive, Black Lamb and Grey Falcon. Written on the eve of World War II, when Croatia was allying its fascist Ustashe government with Nazi Germany, it seems a little too kind to Serb extremism. Ivo Andric’s Bridge on the Drina, set in the Ottoman era, offers a wider sweep.

In nearly every Serb home and public place hangs a picture, “Maid of Kosovo,” showing a woman tending to a dying fighter. It commemorates a battle lost to the Ottomans in 1389, the touchstone of Serbian existence. The national mythic hero is the haiduk, a brigand who would prey on Turkish caravans passing through the mountains. Looting became a kind of twisted patriotism. When the Serbs destroyed mosques and the famed library in Sarajevo with its trove of Islamic literature, they were trying to eradicate history.

Despite the complex background behind every crisis that breaks, American policymakers tend to see other countries in their own familiar terms. And many reporters interpret events according to their own perceptions.

This is a particular problem in the Holy Land where each dramatic event is linked to something that happened earlier, whether it was centuries ago — or last week. In 1982, we landed Marines in Lebanon to help shore up the “legitimate” government. The problem was that a considerable part — maybe even most — of the Lebanese didn’t think the government was legitimate, which is what the brutal civil war was about. The Marines amounted to just another militia, and a smiling Shiite suicide bomber drove a truck full of explosives into their barracks one Sunday morning, killing 242 of them.

The battleship New Jersey fired shells the size of Volkswagens into the surrounding hills. U.S. forces departed, and Americans forgot about it. Three years later, Shiite hijackers seized TWA flight 847 soon after it left Athens. “They were stamping up and down the aisles yelling about New Jersey,” a woman hostage said. “I was afraid to tell them where I was from. What did we ever do to them?”

Iran was a watershed for me: it quite literally opened a whole new world. It should have been a watershed for America, too.

Back then, swaddled in our deluded dependence on the shah, ignorance might have been understandable. Now it is not.

A much greater body of knowledge is available today, some of the best of it in postgraduate schools run by the military. Yet it was ignored by that small band of ideologues in interlocking Washington think tanks, egged on by wishful or scheming exiles with a cockamamie scheme to reshape the region, producing what is without doubt the worst foreign policy disaster in American history.

Ignored, too, was an uncannily prescient report put together by the Army War College on the eve of invasion, which predicted virtually every problem that later surfaced — particularly the danger of anarchy and looting following the fall of Baghdad — and gave very specific recommendations for dealing with them.

“People had other priorities,” its author Conrad C. Crane, a former lieutenant colonel who had taught military history at West Point, told me.

So, five years into the war how much wiser are we?

Jeff Stein, the national security editor of “Congressional Quarterly” recently tried to ask a few pretty basic questions of the new chairman of the House Intelligence Committee, Sylvester Reyes, a Texas Democrat. Such as, al Qaeda, are they Sunni or Shiite?

“Al Qaeda, they have both,” said Mr. Reyes, a former Border Patrolman. “You’re talking about predominantly?”

Somewhat flummoxed, Mr. Stein said, “Sure.”

“Predominantly, probably Shiite,” the congressman said.

Wrong. Couldn’t be wronger. As Sunni extremists known as Salafis, al Qaeda followers tend to view Shiites as heretics, worse than infidels. Hezbollah he wouldn’t even touch, cutting the interview short.

The guy is a congressman and probably has other things to worry about. How about a law enforcement professional, specializing in the field? Mr. Stein asked Willie Hulon, chief of the FBI’s national security branch whether Iran and Hezbollah were Sunni or Shiite.

With a 50/50 chance, he guessed both were Sunni. WRONG. This would be hysterical if it weren’t so serious.

And our president?

Peter Galbraith, a former ambassador and lately an advisor to the Kurds, recounts in his book, The End of Iraq: How American Incompetence Created a War Without End, how three Iraqi representatives who briefed Mr. Bush realized that he was not aware that Sunni and Shiite branches divided Islam. “I thought the Iraqis were Muslims,” he observed.

An ahistorical America should not have forgotten the period around 1920, as the dust of World War I settled, and victorious European powers decided to remake the Middle East.

In the midst of the war, a British diplomat in Cairo, Sir Mark Sykes, had his army’s supply shop sew a new flag in red, green, white, and black. It was to be the banner of the Great Arab Revolt fluttering over raiders led by the Hashemite family against the Ottoman Empire. In later years it would be the basis for flags of, among others, Jordan and the Palestine Liberation Organization.

But Sir Mark was not to be remembered as the Betsy Ross of Arabia. Instead he went down in history as one half of a secret double cross — the Sykes-Picot agreement of 1916. The British effectively sold out their Arab allies by recognizing French interests in the Middle East. With victory, they would divide Arab lands between them.

The decaying Ottoman Empire was allied with Germany and Austria-Hungary. Its caliph was the supreme religious leader of Islam. But in Arab coffee houses and underground societies, stirrings of nationalism opposed Turkish rule.

The British commander, Lord Kitchener, and his Middle East experts wanted to fan the flames; they devised a scheme to create a new caliph beholden to them so Britain could control the region after the war. Oil was not yet the prize. They wanted to protect the route to India.

Their candidate was Emir Hussein of the Hijaz, the sharif of Mecca, guardian of Islam’s holiest places, and great-great grandfather of the current King of Jordan, Abdullah. His understanding was his family would be granted a kingdom, headquartered in Damascus.

The plan faltered until a boyish captain, T.E. Lawrence, used vacation time to meet the family. He was charmed by a younger son, Feisal, who looked the part of a dashing leader. “An absolute ripper,” he wrote to a friend. A wider tale of the creation of the modern Middle East is told in admirable detail in David Fromkin’s A Peace to End All Peace. For the less rigorous, the movie “Lawrence of Arabia” is a pretty good approximation.

Feisal led the triumphant allies into Damascus, but his reign would be brief. In post-war conferences, Britain and France divided Arabia into artificial states, literally drawing lines in the sand, with an added wild card: the Balfour Declaration granted a Jewish homeland. France secured a League of Nations mandate over Lebanon, where it could protect Maronite Catholics, and crossed the mountains to what is now Syria.

Feisal, ousted by the French, had his franchise shifted by the British to a newly created Iraq, which he had never visited. Its three former Ottoman provinces roughly divided Kurdish, Sunni and Shiite populations.

Britain held control over Iraq, Egypt, Palestine, and a new country, Trans-Jordan, created when Feisal’s older brother, Abdullah, marched into an empty backwater and threatened to go on to Damascus. Nationalist revolts in Syria, Iraq, and Palestine are remembered today by Iraqi insurgents who chose an evocative name: the “1920 Revolution Brigade.”

Hussein declared himself caliph, as planned. But in 1925, Abdul Aziz Ibn Saud stormed out of the desert with his Wahhabi warriors — the Islamic fundamentalists of their day — and ejected him from Mecca to create Saudi Arabia.

Immediately after 9/11, the reaction of the principal actors revealed sharply different grasps of history.

President George W. Bush called for a “crusade” against terrorism, apparently unaware that in the Arab world the term does not conjure up visions of the noble romances of Sir Walter Scott but rather the wholesale slaughter of Muslims and Jews in the bloody sacking of Jerusalem. Indeed, “crusader” is a standard part of Osama Bin Laden’s rhetoric in describing his enemies.

For his part, Bin Laden released a television tape, appearing as an austere desert warrior, his rifle leaning against a rock, praising the destruction of the twin towers and the thousands of deaths.

“But when the sword fell upon America after eighty years,” he said, “hypocrisy raised its head up high bemoaning those killers who toyed with the blood, honor and sanctities of Muslims.”

Eighty years? Do the math.

Islam was born in seventh-century Mecca where the rapid growth of finance and commerce threatened old values. The warriors of the Prophet Mohammed’s monotheistic religion swept out of the desert spreading the new faith by the sword, creating an empire that in time would spread from Spain to far Asia. It reached dazzling heights of learning and culture, particularly under the eighth century Abbasid dynasty in Baghdad. But a lasting, bitter schism formed between majority Sunnis and minority Shiites.

By the time Europeans carved up the Middle East in their own interests, finance and commerce again edged aside faith, particularly with the discovery of oil. The British adventurer Gertrude Bell quite literally drew the borders of Iraq. The late Egyptian diplomat Tahseen Bashir liked to say that only Egypt and Iran had real histories as nation-states. The rest, he said, were just “tribes with flags.”

As Britain and France loosened their grip after World War II, the governments they left behind came to be seen as corrupt, inefficient, brutal, the pawns of foreigners or all of the above. In Egypt, Syria and Iraq, they were overthrown in military coups. The 1960s saw a search for new ideologies. Syria and Iraq declared themselves Ba’athist states, Pan-Arab, secular and socialist. In reality both were dictatorships that centered on a small circle of religious minorities: Alawites in Syria, who composed only about 11 percent of the population, and in Iraq, Sunni Muslims from Saddam Hussein’s home area of Tikrit. The Arab Nationalist dream of Egypt’s Gamal Abdel Nasser died in the disastrous defeat by Israel in the Six Day War of 1967.

The Muslim Brotherhood, the grandfather of today’s Islamic movements, was founded in Egypt in 1928, the alternative to secular nationalism and socialism. Its slogan: “The Koran is our constitution.” Persecuted in Egypt, Syria and other countries, many found refuge in Saudi Arabia where they became influential in the religious and education systems. They were a vanguard of what would become (Sunni) Islamic fundamentalists known variously as Wahhabis, Salafis and Deobandis, claiming to seek a return to an earlier, purer Islam and often distinguishable by untrimmed beards.

The most influential intellectual text for these fundamentalists is “Signposts” (sometimes translated as “Milestones”) by Sayyid Qutb, an Egyptian literary critic, published in 1964. He posits the concept of jahiliyya — pre-Islamic barbarism — meaning that the rulers of the Arab world are illegitimate. He was deeply influenced by a visit to the United States between 1948 and 1950, which he found appalling. He was particularly revolted by attending a church dance in Greeley, Colorado.

“Every young man took the hand of a young woman,” he wrote. “And these were young men and women who had just been singing their hymns! Red and blue lights, with only a few white lamps, illuminated the dance floor. The room became a confusion of feet and legs; arms twisted around hips; lips met lips; chests pressed together.”

Shiite Moslems — who predominate in Iran and are found in substantial numbers in Iraq, Lebanon, Bahrain and the Eastern Quarter of Saudi Arabia — began to formulate their own ideology in the same period. The shah of Iran sent Ayatollah Khomeini into exile to the holy city of Najaf, Iraq in 1963. There, with his mentor Ayatollah Mohammed Bakr Sadr, who founded the underground movement Al Dawa (The Call, as in call to prayers), he developed the ideas that led to the Islamic revolution that so dramatically changed the Middle East.

The American invasion and occupation of Iraq, far from creating a benign, democratic Middle East friendly to Israel as neo-conservative planners intended, has instead spawned a magnet and training ground for Islamic jihadists in an already unstable part of the world. Inevitably, history reemerged. Violence surged after bombs shattered the golden dome in Samarra, one of the Shiites’ holiest sites where the Hidden Imam is believed buried in his cave. The Shiite militia took a predictable name: the Mahdi Army.

Thus far, the main beneficiary of America’s enterprise in Iraq has been Iran, which nurtured many of its Shiite co-religionists who now hold power in Baghdad.

In Afghanistan, the Taliban are in resurgence and the authority of our hand-picked president, Hamid Karzi, extends not much beyond his own palace. The hinterlands have resumed their role as the supplier of nearly all the world’s heroin.

Nuclear-armed Pakistan may be the most dangerous place on Earth. Separated from India as a Muslim homeland by the departing British in 1947, its governments have alternated between corrupt civilians and military coups. Now it sometimes seems less a country than a crime wave with postage stamps, its Punjabi, Sindhi, Baluch and Pushton ethnic groups at odds. It is plagued with assassinations and suicide bombers. The lawless, mountainous border region with Afghanistan is the new headquarters for the Taliban, al Qaeda, and other jihadist groups seemingly able to seize territory at will.

In Lebanon, Hezbollah, backed by Iran and Syria and basking in its stubborn resistance to Israel’s latest invasion, is in a standoff with an American-backed Sunni-Druze-Christian coalition that has paralyzed the government and left it without a president for months. A simmering stew of 17 religions, the beautiful but cursed land suffered fifteen years of civil war and another fifteen of what amounted to Syrian occupation. Lebanon was gerrymandered by the French to benefit their clients, the Maronite Christians. While there has been no census since 1932, because of the political implications, it is likely that Shiites make up the largest share of the population. America’s image in the Arab world took another huge blow in the summer of 2006 when Secretary of State Condoleeza Rice openly tried to block a cease-fire, claiming the Israeli invasion was “the birth pains of a new Middle East.”

So much for good intentions.

When the British general Stanley Maude entered Baghdad in triumph in 1917 he declared to the Iraqis: “Our armies do not come into your cities as conquerors or enemies, but as liberators.” Pretty soon the tribes were in an insurgency, kidnapping and killing British officers. Pioneering new technology, the British bombed them from the air. They held an electoral referendum for their chosen king and declared he had gotten virtually all the votes.

Sound familiar?

In America / Essays / John Kifner