Tea leaves, crystal ball and civil wars that spread...

One of the arguments against ending the US occupation of Iraq is that our military presence there is somehow preventing the spread of violence into other parts of the region. I have seen maps on television with little smoke streams coming up from Lebanon and Gaza, suggesting that the whole place is like a hot pile of charcoal, wet with lighter fluid, ready to burst into flames at any moment. It's an easy message to buy since our news is packaged and portion-controlled to fit into half-hour evening time slots (the alphabet networks) or even smaller soundbites on the cable channels.

Sorry, I don't buy it. Nothing I have studied in history tells me that civil wars are contagious. Like cancer or kidney disease, they may be terrible for the victim, but civil wars do not spread like chicken pox or the flu. This is not to say that other areas are not at risk. The risk is definitely there, whether it be Lebanon, Palestinian Gaza, or anywhere else you want to mention. But those areas were at risk before the Iraq adventure, and are following very different dynamics. Also, for the moment the leadership in those other two "at risk" areas are not sounding as dangerous as one might think.

Take a moment to read this post by Elijah Zarwan.
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The tensions in Lebanon following Gemayel’s assassination have been reflected in the Lebanese blogs over the past week. One post from Mustapha, in particular, struck me as particularly timely given King Abdallah’s warnings about civil wars in Lebanon, Palestine, and Iraq today...

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He goes on to quote words that indicate that talk of civil war in Lebanon is more a creation of news machines than an upsurge of political and social conflict.
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People the world over will be watching/reading about our civil war unfolding, in the safety of their countries, and a few months down the line, popcorn in hand, they'll start getting bored of our news. They'll start dissing us as inherently violent and saying that we deserve this because we can't stand each other. The very mention of Lebanon would guarantee their reach for the remote control and switch to Jay Leno.

Whoever the bad guy is (Syria or Israel), the above Scenario is HELL, and we shouldn't let it happen. Honest communication should immediately take the place of tense mobilization.

Mustapha is right. This is not about political passions bursting forth in civil war. It is about the threat of that happening on the part of manipulative leaders pressing this or that agenda. The people of Lebanon -- ALL of Lebanon, thanks to Israel's recent thrashing -- are by now sick and tired of bloodshed. I doubt they are ready to resume fighting in any great numbers, no matter how gifted Nasrallah may be as a charismatic leader. At some level, he probably knows that and will not be calling for more sacrifices any time soon. He may be an extremist, but he's no dummy.

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My guess is that in the absence of US forces the parties involved would come to terms more quickly to end the bleeding that is now tearing apart what's left of Iraqi social and political identity. It is madness to suggest that after fighting Americans for the last four years the Iraqis would sit still for Iran or Syria, or even some land-locked independent Kurdistan, to come in and determine their future.
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My friend Abu Khaleel said that Iraq has a long history of peaceful tollerance between Sunnis and Shiites and I believe him. Moreover, most of what is happening -- and this is the argument that there is "no civil war" going on -- is in fact occurring within a short radius of Baghdad. Most of the country is not engaged in the extreme ugliness that we are being fed by the media.
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One more item before I end this post.
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Today's Washington Post has a satirical piece by Anthony Shadid about the Lebanese factions (Again, thanks to Zarwan for the pointer.) which illustrates the light-hearted manner that people in that country sometimes take their politics.
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...advertisements went up this month on 300 billboards across the Lebanese capital and appeared in virtually every newspaper in the country. Thousands of e-mails carried the ads across the Internet to expatriates. Each offered its take on what one of the campaign's creative directors called a country on the verge of "absurdistan" -- cooking lessons by Greek Orthodox, building for sale to Druze, hairstyling by an Armenian Catholic, a fashion agency looking for "a beautiful Shiite face." At the bottom, the ads read in English, "Stop sectarianism before it stops us," or, more bluntly in Arabic, "Citizenship is not sectarianism."
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The campaign, designed for free by an ad agency and promoted by a civil society group, has forced Lebanon to look at itself at a time when the country is spiraling into one of its worst political crises in years. The timing was coincidental, the message universal, in a landscape with ever dwindling common ground: The forces that dragged Lebanon into one civil war are threatening another.
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Many have praised the ads for asking uncomfortable, even taboo questions about a system in which sectarian affiliation determines everything from the identity of the president to loyalty to sports teams. Some have mistaken the campaign for reality. Across the capital, one in six billboards was torn down, prevented from being put up or splashed with paint, usually the tactic of choice for conservative Muslims irked by lingerie ads.
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"They didn't get it," said Fouad Haraki, a 53-year-old shawarma vendor, idly dragging on a cigarette next to a kerosene tank, across the street from billboards that had been defaced. "They just read what was written on top, not what was on the bottom."
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By tradition, the president is Maronite, the prime minister Sunni, the parliament speaker Shiite. Other posts are reserved for Greek Orthodox, Greek Catholic and Druze. Boy scouts are organized by community, not country -- the Mahdi Scouts for the Shiites, for instance. Television stations have their own sectarian bent -- the Lebanese Broadcasting Corp. for Christians, Future for the Sunnis. Christians are partial to the Sagesse basketball team, Sunnis the Riyadi team. There are even two Armenian soccer teams -- Homenmen and Homenetmen -- one faithful to Armenian leftists, the other to the community's right wing. Before this summer's war, Sunni soccer fans loyal to Ansar brawled in a stadium with Shiite youths loyal to Nijmeh. The system, known as confessionalism, dates to long before Lebanon's independence in 1943.
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But there is a growing sense that the decades-old principles underlying Lebanese politics have grown obsolete. In some ways, today's crisis is about the assertion of power -- a coup to its critics -- by the long-disenfranchised Shiite community led by Hezbollah. Hardly anyone can forecast with certainty how the struggle will end, but almost everyone sees it as a turning point, a crisis that intersects raw ambition with ideology, foreign policy, perspective and history, all awash in sectarian combustion.

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The armchair generals who shout directions from living rooms across America have no idea what is really going on over there. And, yes, I include myself in that group. Like Will Rogers, all I know is what I read on the internets.

(And I will be really happy when Beta Blogger gets this annoying problem with spaces between paragraphs figured out. I'm tired of putting stupid-looking periods between paragraphs in order to make my posts format in a visually pleasing manner.)