America’s neurotic denial on Syria

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The brutality that the regime of Syrian President Bashar al-Assad has employed in crushing rebel forces and attacking civilians in Homs is yet another crucial indicator of the extent to which civil conflict in Syria has developed its own inexorable momentum. In the United States, however, the debate continues to focus on ways of avoiding facing this ugly reality and dealing with it proactively.

The policy of the Obama administration and much of the discourse within the American foreign policy establishment reflect symptoms of neurotic denial. The reality that hasn’t been fully accepted in Washington yet is that the Rubicon of civil conflict has long since been crossed and there’s no going back.

The stark choice facing the United States, and all external actors, is whether or not they care to be involved in shaping the nature and the outcome of that conflict, or prefer to remain largely passive observers and then deal with the consequences.

The loudest voices in the American conversation are still those counseling the need for a political solution to the crisis. This idea is rooted in two indefensible fantasies: first, that the present regime might be willing to cut a deal rather than pursue a military solution; and second, that there is a way to avoid the further intensification of conflict on the ground.

Built into this wishful thinking is a paradox. In theory, it might be possible to shift the calculations of some elements in the present regime toward cutting a deal with the opposition. However, the only way to achieve such a radical shift is by transforming the equation on the ground. And the only way to do that is to proactively engage in the conflict that already exists and is going to intensify—whether or not outside parties intervene directly or indirectly.

Most aspects of the American policy conversation that acknowledge the need to engage with events on the ground in Syria have focused on the humanitarian calamity and the principle of Responsibility to Protect. A respected former US official, Anne-Marie Slaughter, has proposed creating “no-kill zones” and safe havens for refugees, and even supplying arms to rebel groups “for defensive purposes” only.

Even when packaged as a humanitarian intervention, such measures would have clear strategic implications, and the idea that arms could function only in a “defensive” manner in such a conflict is, frankly, inconceivable. Meanwhile, Republican Senators John McCain and Lindsey Graham have simply advocated arming rebels, and this sentiment is growing.

Even though most in the Obama administration continue to maintain a risk-averse attitude toward Syria, it’s becoming ever clearer that entirely opting out of an ongoing conflict that cannot be reversed simply leaves the field to others. Over the weekend, US officials said they hadevidence that Iran was more heavily involved in the repression than had been previously believed. They also said that the increased use of improvised explosive devices by rebels suggested “outside support” and that the conflict was therefore likely to expand.

While the capabilities of the Syrian rebel forces have been much derided, New York Times photographer Tyler Hicks, who also covered the Libya conflict, recently wrote that his strong impression was that “The Free Syrian Army is much more organized than the rebel fighters in Libya. Because of the growing number of defectors, there’s a stock of able, trained soldiers and officers mounting in Syria… but they don’t yet have the weapons to put up a realistic fight.”

Changing the equation on the ground to help create that “realistic fight” and force the regime to begin to deploy its largely Sunni military rank-and-file rather than its largely Alawite elite forces could prove a crucial turning point. It could unleash mass defections, with at least some heavy weapons presumably.

Hicks had been traveling in Syria with the late New York Timescorrespondent Anthony Shadid. In an interview with local activists taped a few hours before his death, Shadid opined that he thought the regime would eventually fall, but that it would take a long time. This evaluation seems entirely justified and has two vital implications.

First, the less foreign intervention there is, of whatever kind, on the side of the opposition, the longer it will take, the messier it will be, and the more people will die. Second, there is a huge opportunity for outside forces to help shape the nature and even the identity of the opposition that will eventually depose the regime. If the United States wants to leave that role to others such as Turkey, Saudi Arabia, Qatar or Islamist groups, it can hardly complain about the outcome.

The Obama administration, which seeks to reconcile American values and interests, has a major opportunity to do so in this case. Persisting with policies based on wishing things in Syria weren’t as they are fails both humanitarian values and strategic interests.

Mammocking Coriolanus

Ralph Fiennes' new adaptation of Coriolanus — which he directs and stars in as Caius Martius Coriolanus –is deeply flawed in many ways but also has much to offer, especially if it can succeed in re-connecting parts of the public with an undeservedly neglected masterwork. On the positive side, its updating of the story to a contemporary Balkan setting is powerful and suggestive. The use of multi-media is ingenious and, mostly, surprisingly effective. Many of the debates (that survive the extreme cuts in the text) are shifted to faux television news programming, and the like, with impressive results. It actually works in updating some of the drama and making it accessible to a contemporary audience.

There are three possible ideas behind such radically updated stagings (as opposed to the more obvious Roman or Jacobean settings): 1) that they will reveal something new within the text; 2) that they will tell us something important about our own era; 3) that they will bring the play to a new audience that otherwise would have difficulty connecting with it. In this case, only the third purpose is served, and that alone is probably sufficient to justify the choice in its broadest terms. But it really is important that audiences don't think they've experienced Coriolanus after they've seen this film, because truly they have not. They must at the very least turn to the much better BBC television production starring Alan Howard, which is easily available on DVD, and, more importantly, read the play itself, in its entirety.

The multimedia — television, Skype, mobile phone cameras, etc., though Twitter and Facebook are oddly missing — in the film is not only meta-multimedia, but meta-theatrical. So much of the political drama in the play is, literally, staged that this works extremely well. The tribunes rehearse the mob before the banishment of Martius. The patricians argue about how best to manipulate the public and how Martius should stage-manage his initial appeals to them for power, and, even more blatantly, later to repeal the sentence of banishment. Their meta-theatrical language is overt: Cominius reassures him "we'll prompt you," as his mother Volumnia urges him to "perform a part Thou hast not done before." Coriolanus is a virtual hall of mirrors of ironic staging and playing. This self-conscious staging, which is practiced and inherently artificial, as opposed to spontaneous and therefore, in his view, authentic, offends Martius' sensibilities to the core. He is rash, proud and driven by emotions he does not understand and “virtues” he cannot control or moderate, and therefore is incapable of acting politically. He is shocked that his mother and other patrician allies urge him to dissemble for political gain, protesting, “Would you have me False to my nature? Rather say I play The man I am." When he finally relents, mainly because of their browbeating, he is still contemptuous:

I'll mountebank their loves,

Cog their hearts from them, and come home beloved

Of all the trades in Rome. Look, I am going:

Commend me to my wife. I'll return consul;

Or never trust to what my tongue can do

I' the way of flattery further.

Of course it all backfires disastrously because his tongue is absolutely useless for flattery and is only effective for threats and invective.

Fiennes' meta-multimedia production captures this inability of Coriolanus to function effectively in the staged world of political theater and practiced artifice. The trial scene in which his banishment is confirmed rather than repealed is staged on a TV debate set, and as he leans forward to begin his opening speech urging reconciliation and his own forgiveness, "The honour'd gods Keep Rome in safety…," Fiennes' Coriolanus is unable to control the feedback from his microphone, eliciting derisive laughter from the hostile audience. Time and again the media representations of his political and even military activities, and the mass media environment and technology with which he is so uncomfortable, mainly serve to undermine his ambitions and cast him in the worst possible light. They are in this adaptation aptly depicted as best suited to the demagogic manipulations of the tribunes, although the crafty old politician Menenius also seems appropriately adept at deploying them.

What is far less effective is the way in which so much of Coriolanus is lost in this adaptation. The crediting of the screenplay to John Logan, “based on the play by William Shakespeare,” should be carefully noted by all viewers. This is not, in fact, Coriolanus, even though very little extraneous dialogue is added and only a few words updated. It's more what is left out that draws the distinction between the play itself and this film adaptation of it. Most of the complex political drama in Coriolanus is lost here, excised presumably for simplification and to keep it short enough to hold the attention of a modern filmgoing audience. I think they've underestimated the public rather badly. Gone is the central fact that the bread riots at the opening of the play are quelled mainly by granting the plebeians the right to have five tribunes of their own choice to represent them in the government. In other words, the riots have introduced an element of public input into the Roman government that was previously missing, the roots of democracy or at least a measure of popular franchise. More than any of the other patricians, Martius is appalled by this capitulation to “the rabble” and predicts that it will be the origin of sedition and chaos. It certainly sets the stage for his own tragedy and the near-destruction of Rome at his very hands. He and the people are right to mutually mistrust each other. They cannot coexist in peace or harmony.

Another important omission is that in the play, during the first war against the Volsces, Martius is only a senior officer under the command of the serving Consul, Cominius. As the two leading popular tribunes privately fret, this secondary role means that he will likely escape all blame if the war goes badly but get almost all the credit if it goes well. In the new adaptation, Martius is a general at the outset and clearly the leader of the campaign. So this subtle but crucial appreciation of how power is accrued by indirect means as well as directly is most unfortunately excised. Indeed, most of the complex political infighting between patricians, plebeians, tribunes, Coriolanus himself, his mother and other Roman forces is obscured in Logan's script. Instead, there are very long and quite familiar, sometimes clichéd if well-shot, action sequences in what often is simply yet another war movie. After the first 15 minutes I was left asking myself, okay, this is fine, but where does Shakespeare come in to it? He does, but not enough and certainly not fully.

The film misses an important staging opportunity, one that its medium is far better suited to than theater. In several crucial passages in the play, Coriolanus is described as “a thing of blood” and looking as if he were "flayed.” In a theater, it might be hard to actually enact this hyperbolic language, but film seems to offer a perfect opportunity for that. There is plenty of blood in Fiennes' Coriolanus, possibly too much for some viewers, and some of the protracted combat scenes are gratuitous and overwhelm or omit crucial language in favor of some pretty clichéd war movie stuff. But in fact, to my mind, there isn't enough blood in it, at least in some crucial scenes, particularly Martius' blood-soaked reemergence from the Corioles city center in which he had been trapped alone. This film could have been one of the first times in which he is really depicted as emerging from the city gates absolutely caked head to foot and dripping with blood, as is described in the text, and it's a great pity they stopped short of that.

Fiennes is not at his finest in the film, overdoing his wrath at times and delivering a performance that oddly lacks subtlety. Apparently his theater performances in the play were infinitely better, although I did not see them. I did, however, have the great pleasure of attending his performance as Prospero on stage in The Tempest in London last October, and he was simply brilliant (as was Trevor Nunn's direction). A much younger Prospero than we're used to seeing gives new meaning to his renunciation of his “rough magic” at the end of the play, suggesting that there is much left for him to do through normal human means rather than creating the more typical aura of a very old man preparing his exit from the mortal world by arranging a more harmonious relationship for the next generation (and ensuring that his grandchildren will be in a much more powerful position than he ever was). Fiennes' Prospero was everything his filmed Martius just isn't: a nearly pitch perfect performance.

His first outing as a director is certainly competent, with his use of multimedia as its most outstanding feature. Possibly his most inspired moment is the cinematically striking echo of Coppola's framing of Brando's Captain Kurtz as Fiennes focuses on an ominous close-up of the back of the newly re-shaved head of Martius (with a dragon tattoo at the bottom of his neck) as the unlikely Volscian warlord. But the long and — like so much else in the film wordless and unnecessary — head shaving scene itself is strangely and amateurishly filmed. Fiennes clearly has some way to go in mastering the craft of being behind the camera.

In a sense, Fiennes probably didn't do himself a favor by casting Vanessa Redgrave as Volumnia either, because while her superb performance greatly enriches the film, it also underscores how much better he could have done. She virtually takes over the movie, and the script helps her by scrupulously and appropriately maintaining the centrality of her character. Brian Cox is magnificent as the wily, sensitive and somewhat cynical old politician and surrogate father figure for Martius, Menenius. His role isn't simply maintained, it's enhanced, while the important character Valeria is essentially written out of the script altogether, with many of her most important lines either gone or inexplicably given to Menenius. One wonders, indeed, why they even bothered to include Valeria in the intercession scene in which she joins Coriolanus' mother, wife and son to beg mercy for Rome, especially since we have learned nothing about her or her character by that point in the film.

The excision of Valeria's lines involves the biggest single mistake in the entire production: the removal of the passage in which she describes Martius' son's bizarre and deeply emblematic encounter with a butterfly. I've written in the past that I think that there are often-overlooked passages in many if not most Shakespeare plays that encapsulate the central concerns of the text, for example the King Stephen song Iago sings in Othello. In Coriolanus, this passage spoken by Valeria is another instance of this pattern in Shakespeare's mature work. She says of the boy:

I saw him run after a gilded

butterfly: and when he caught it, he let it go

again; and after it again; and over and over he

comes, and again; catched it again; or whether his

fall enraged him, or how 'twas, he did so set his

teeth and tear it; O, I warrant it, how he mammocked

it!

This passage could not better describe Coriolanus's own tragic relationship with Roman virtues, power and glory. The butterfly imagery also crucially anticipates Coriolanus' own transformation, after his banishment, into an apparently inhuman or superhuman creature, a metamorphosis that terrifies the Romans and also sets the stage for his own destruction at the hands of his erstwhile Volscian "frienemies." It also encapsulates the endless echoes and repetitions in the play: Coriolanus faces the Volsces single-handedly three times (first in Corioles, second when he goes alone to Antium in search of Aufidius, and third when he returns to face almost certain execution); he is charged with treason twice, first by the Romans and second by the Volsces; and so forth. The same scenes are enacted time and again, as with the chasing of the butterfly, in a kind of repetition compulsion, but each time the stakes are raised until his continuously threatened destruction finally becomes inevitable. As the play unfolds, Martius is in effect chasing down and then finally ripping himself to tatters.

Like the King Stephen song in Othello, indeed more so, this passage is virtually a summary of the entire plot. Valeria is important to the play in many ways, but given that the almost total excision of her role also involved the removal of this all-important passage, it's a virtually fatal error. I was astonished by the mistake, and I'm still at a loss to explain how they could possibly have committed it. Mammocked, incidentally, means to have torn to shreds, one of those marvelously obscure yet rich terms one encounters in Shakespeare. Not only the whole passage but the word itself is quite unforgettable. It's one of the great takeaways from Coriolanus as a whole, and the film's audience is robbed by its absence. Removing the "mammocked" passage mammocks the play itself, or at least this aspect of it, and leaves the film at best mimicking and at worst mocking it.

The oddest choice of all is what seems to replace the gilded butterfly of the play in the new film: an old barber's chair spray-painted gold. In a drunken revelry with his adoring Volscian troops, the once again shaven-headed and reborn superhuman Coriolanus-Kurtz ritually shaves the heads of his followers. The chair is carried aloft as a kind of fetish, and it's clearly the gilded representation of metamorphosis substituting for the butterfly of Valeria's anecdote. Martius also receives the deputation of women and his son seated in this odd prop. What possessed Logan and Fiennes to dispense with the gilded butterfly and replace it with a gilded… barber's chair (of all things) I'd be fascinated to learn. Perhaps they were inspired by the cutting observation by Martius' love-hate partner, once bitter enemy now nominal ally, Tullus Aufidius, ruminating on the fickle affections of Roman society towards Coriolanus:

So our virtues

Lie in the interpretation of the time:

And power, unto itself most commendable,

Hath not a tomb so evident as a chair

To extol what it hath done.

This passage is widely regarded as one of the high-points in the play, and possibly this is the inspiration for the barber's chair folly. Nonetheless, these choices seem to me utterly inexplicable, if not unforgivable.

Throughout the film, the language of Coriolanus is not done justice. Viewers of this truncated version will not readily notice how, extremely unusually for any later Shakespeare play, and especially tragedy, little soliloquy there is in it. Martius does not engage in any soliloquies, because he does not do self-examination or reflection, let alone criticism. He merely charges ahead. There are some long speeches that border on semi-soliloquy, such as his reflections upon first arriving at Antium, but these are also almost entirely cut. The imagery in Coriolanus relies on the heavy use of antithesis and contradiction, even oxymoron, to make its points, and a great deal of this gets lost in the multimedia extravaganza. There is another noteworthy aspect of the language in Coriolanus: the unusually and at times awkwardly insistent use of contractions, sometimes rather extreme and unlikely ones, which help to create and reflect an atmosphere of suffocation, urban overcrowding and claustrophobia.

These contractions, many of which are unusual even for Shakespeare and the English of his day (he was a highly idiosyncratic writer even by the standards of his contemporaries), are especially jarring to the modern ear and Logan apparently decided to dispense with most of them. It's another shortchanging of the audience. As for Fiennes, he seriously undercuts this atmosphere of urban and combat claustrophobia with long sequences, particularly but not only during Coriolanus' trek from Rome to Antium, which are filled with shots of huge barren wastelands, empty fields, small-town detritus and so forth. It emphasizes Martius' isolation and quest for reinvention, but it undercuts the atmosphere created by the actual language in the play. Perhaps that's ironically appropriate since the character Coriolanus does not trust language, does not know how to use it properly, and is constantly betrayed by its subtleties. But the removal of these contractions in the script combined with the many shots depicting rural and urban isolation (the inclusion of some genuinely claustrophobic scenes notwithstanding) creates a very different atmosphere than the stifling, overcrowded one suggested by Shakespeare's own very unusual language in this play.

Why Coriolanus is so frustrating: tragedy as a dead-end  

This adaptation is welcome in spite of its many flaws because Coriolanus is notoriously and understandably difficult for audiences to connect and engage with. The evidence that this is one of Shakespeare's last tragedies and one of his later plays is entirely convincing, and this only adds to the importance of recognizing that in Coriolanus, the limitations of tragedy for Shakespeare are reached at two different registers. First, Shakespeare runs up against the impenetrable difficulty of shaping a tragedy around a central character that is fundamentally unsympathetic. For all of his admirable qualities, bravery, integrity, etc., Martius is essentially an out-of-control human wrecking crew. His mother is not wrong, although she's thinking in far too limited terms of formal battle, when she says of him,

…before him he

carries noise, and behind him he leaves tears:

Death, that dark spirit, in 's nervy arm doth lie;

Which, being advanced, declines, and then men die.

In fact, he leaves a trail of devastation wherever he goes, whether during peace or war, and while it's possible, and indeed difficult not, to get caught up in the excitement and drama of his heroics, he is ultimately a truly disturbing figure who is only useful as an instrument of destruction.

The second crisis that Shakespeare apparently confronted in Coriolanus is not only that he was trying to build a tragedy culminating in the death of an unsympathetic character with whom very few readers or audience members will readily identify or sympathize, but that the flaws that define his tragic fate are — in Roman or at least Jacobean pseudo-Roman value systems — all “virtues.” Several critics have argued that at the heart of all of Shakespeare's tragic heroes is some version or another of the flaw or sin of pride. If Martius' characterological issues that lead to tragedy are also bound up with pride — which they certainly are, as the plebeian rebels in act one, scene one have already identified — these are qualities that would have been normatively regarded as virtuous, but are being take into an antisocial and indeed sociopathic extreme.

It's not, therefore, terribly surprising that in spite of its undoubted excellence, it has been difficult for Coriolanus to connect with audiences in the same way that other, in some ways less finely crafted, Shakespeare tragedies have over the centuries. And, it is probably this central feature: that it's tragic hero's character flaws are an excess of certain versions of "virtue" — theoretically, an oxymoron and certainly a paradox, especially given the extent to which he is an unsympathetic if not in many ways repulsive character — that means Coriolanus was either intended by Shakespeare as a conscious final effort at tragedy as dead-end, or that it emerged as just that in practice. A somewhat earlier play, Troilus and Cressida, is also clearly moving in a similar direction and sets the stage for Coriolanus in numerous fascinating ways, most notably the dysfunctionality of what is nominally a “tragedy” illustrating the limitations of the genre for him at this stage in his career. Either way, A.C. Bradley is absolutely right, the play sets up the last phase of Shakespeare's career – works concerned with reconciliation and forgiveness.

Some aspects of the "reconciliation" at the end of Coriolanus, such as it is, presage those of the later romances, but are unsatisfactory as they yield a tragic ending and are enforced, not least through emotional blackmail. There is no forgiveness at the end of Coriolanus, only his resignation that it is better that he die than Rome burn. It does not portend a better future for Rome, any of its elements, or for Coriolanus' own family either. It avoids calamity but does not restore anything to wholeness, especially not his own character. Martius is moved by his mother's wrath and despair, not her arguments, and his response is purely and typically emotional, driven by an abstract virtue (the due reverence and fealty of a loyal son) and not any evaluation or assessment of what is for the best for anyone. Like Richard II, he embraces his assigned roles too enthusiastically and without regard for their consequences, but also without the theatrical subtlety of Richard, the original drama queen who is always playing to an audience, even simply himself alone in Pomfret Castle.

Martius lacks or withholds from us any deep psychological motivations for his shifts and turns – they appear to be merely the outward expression of the pre-defined roles he is assigned in the Roman order: valiant soldier, proud patrician, vengeful scorned man, dutiful son, but not, fatefully, patriot. This version of "virtue" based on valor and pride is so extreme that it completely overwhelms patriotism. Martius is willing and ready to sack Rome, though surely that would have culminated in his suicide. His change of heart is only affected by his filial submission to his mother's willingness to put patriotism above all other values, but there is no sense that he is actually convinced by her arguments, rather that he submits to her authority, and because of his horror at her public humiliation. He follows his mother to spare her, but cannot forgive his country.

Psychoanalytic critics have, of course, made much of this relationship but without, I think, revealing anything terribly new about either the logic of the play or the motivations of its main character. One doesn't need Freud to see that this is a case of seriously arrested development, compounded (or perhaps caused) by severe emotional abuse by a mother who is simultaneously both excessively controlling and overbearing on the one hand and cold and aloof on the other. Even less helpfully, Kenneth Muir, among others, rejects this reading entirely, holding that Martius is moved ultimately by love for his wife and son, not awe of his mother. Pride, he suggests, is conquered by love. This reading seems to me impossible to sustain: Martius relents only after a tirade by Volumnia that culminates in her icy silence and implicit threat of suicide, and he breaks by crying out, “O mother, mother! What have you done?"

Many critics have correctly posited that this is a rare instance in which Shakespeare "did not love" his "hero" or even really understand him except as an embodiment of irreconcilable abstractions run amok, though he clearly admires much in his creation. There is a palpable dearth of affection from the author to the character, and from the character to anyone else, especially outside of his tiny nuclear family. It is a cold, hard play, driven by a protagonist who is also best described in such terms, and lacks the humanity of almost all of the rest of Shakespeare's mature work. In this sense, in Coriolanus Shakespearean tragedy does indeed reach the point of diminishing returns and seems to have little left to offer, setting the stage for the reconciliatory romances that follow in which pride, vengeance, valor and civic virtues (other than harmony) must be subordinated to the healing of wounds and the restoration of personal and collective wholeness. As G. Wilson Knight noted, for Martius, war is an end in itself, driven by pride and exaggerated "virtus." It has no greater purpose, and therefore the conflicts he engages in are doomed to disastrous consequences.

The difficulties of the play have led to a massive history of wrong-headed analysis. It is not a political commentary as such, despite the enormous efforts of both left and right wing critics to cast it as one. Neither is it, as some have suggested, more of an extended "debate" than a drama. It is a drama and a tragedy, but one of Shakespeare's least engaging because its central character, though both profoundly great in some senses and deeply flawed in others, is not an accessible or convincing one. The character of Coriolanus lacks typical Shakespearean verisimilitude. He isn't even a type. He is the embodiment of a set of values — chiefly forms of quasi-Roman and Jacobean English "virtue" — taken to impossible and uncompromising extremes. Because, not in spite, of his determination to play out these fatally contradictory "virtues" to their logical conclusions, he becomes — despite his incomparable qualities that should have otherwise made him an ideal Roman — a literally impossible person. In assessing this insufferable figure, several critics have rightly cited Aristotle's famous dictum that, "He that is incapable of living in society is either a god or a beast” (Book 1 of the Politics). Caius Martius is frequently compared to both gods and beasts throughout the play, particularly when he begins his assault on Rome, in which he is described as either superhuman or inhuman: a divine creature that "wants nothing of a god but eternity and a heaven to throne in," or as a rampaging dragon or comparable to a merciless “male tiger.”

He is impossible for anyone to deal with reasonably because he is so unbending in his ideals, and in that sense an implausible character and hence impossible for us to recognize or identify with in any sustained manner. We may admire his valor; find his "humility" either genuine or prideful and identify with either of those; or see his rage against unjust and ungrateful Rome legitimate and sympathize with his campaign of revenge. But in the end the extremism in all his qualities is simply inhuman. Even those other Shakespeare characters that are ultimately inscrutable, such as Iago, are somehow more familiar, since, as I have argued elsewhere, we too may often not know what motivates others or even ourselves. Martius' motives are not a mystery but rather are abstract ideas and values that are not fully reconcilable in any person and taken to self-destructive extremes.

Contemporary political readings of Coriolanus

No wonder that most leading critics in the post-World War I period found the play a disastrous failure of Shakespeare's art. It seemed to many of them, in their post-traumatic shock, to be a perversion of both values and craft, and a monument to an author's loss of direction. Everything about it seemed repulsive to their shell-shocked sensibilities. Even the virtues which, if contained and balanced in the protagonist would have made him among the greatest of Romans rather than a tragic figure, seemed perverse and almost insane. In general they, understandably but quite wrongly, rejected even the questions Shakespeare raises in the play as unworthy of consideration and the whole enterprise as not only a failure but a folly.

George Bernard Shaw went even further, though before the war in 1903, seeing the whole thing as so absurd he called it "Shakespeare's greatest comedy." This can be best understood as part of his relentless and sustained attack on Shakespeare's outsized reputation in the 19th century as virtually flawless and infallible. Of course, in trying to "keep people honest" about Shakespeare, Shaw frequently went too far and was probably deliberately provocative and iconoclastic. But Shaw was certainly picking up on the layers of irony in Coriolanus in which, at some level anyway, virtually every character is parodic and absurd. Because of its dead-end qualities, it's certainly possible to read the play as a caricature of a heroic tragedy rather than a well-executed example of one.

The arch-conservative T.S. Eliot was almost alone at the time (in 1919), and indeed now, in regarding Coriolanus, along with Antony and Cleopatra, as Shakespeare's "most assured artistic success," an evaluation he never fully explained in my view. It seems that Eliot was drawn to the tight integration of the narrative in the play, which is particularly focused, lacks extraneous or tangential subplots, and has very few moments of comic relief. But clearly it lacks the dramatic range and complexity of Henry IV, Part One, the emotional depth of King Lear and Othello, the comic genius of A Midsummer Night's Dream and Twelfth Night, or the formal perfection of the playwriting craft in the valedictory The Tempest.

A major achievement in Coriolanus is its uncanny and unusual intermingling of the tragic and the ironic at such a sustained level, as Shaw was no doubt alluding to in his “comedy” jab. This certainly would have powerfully appealed to the author of "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock" in which high-flying Romantic and tragic affectations and allusions are brought crashing to earth by the modernist's ironic sensibility: "I am not Prince Hamlet, nor was meant to be…" etc. Eliot is also the author of the unfinished "Coriolan" poems, "Difficulties of a Statesman from Coriolan" and "Triumphal March from Coriolan," both directly inspired by Shakespeare's play, though very much contextualized in the post-World War I era. Shakespeare's characterization of Coriolanus is also directly referred to in "A Cooking Egg," and in the image of a trapped and self-defeated egoism in Part V of the definitive post-Great War masterpiece The Waste Land with its "aethereal rumours [that] Revive for a moment a broken Coriolanus." It's a powerful image of a civilization that has just torn itself apart, mammocked itself without mercy and at the loss of the flower of a whole generation of young men.

The Coriolan poems reveal a strong desire for traditional forms of order and authority, and a sense that the unbridled (democratic, in practice) popular will threatens anarchy and attendant calamity, and will ultimately give way to  harsher, unhealthy and "unthinking" forms of order imposed by oppressive dictatorships. Eliot clearly saw his own political sensibility reflected in the main character, and in the logic of Shakespeare's play, though his reading of it in that sense has been largely rejected by other critics, both at the time and since. Political actors on the right, far more extreme than Eliot, did try to exploit Coriolanus for propaganda purposes, and the play was banned in the 1930s in France because it was being staged by fascists there and, worse still, was favored by the Nazis in Germany. Right-wingers in general have also tended, without any justification at all, to identify Menenius' fable about the rebellion against the belly (also cut from the film, of course) as the deep political moral of the play, or Shakespeare's own views. In fact, it's little more than an apt illustration of the ability of the old politico to confuse issues, change subjects and fob off grievances with entertaining and avuncular speeches, bizarre analogies and empty assurances. It doesn't even respond directly to the plebeian charge that the patricians are hoarding grain – an accusation that remains neither validated nor disproven by anything further in the text.

Marxist critics haven't fared particularly better in trying to uncover political wisdom or an agenda in the play. This is because, preferring dramatic tension and complexity over all other things, Shakespeare almost never clearly takes sides in political disputes, even, insofar as possible, in his English history plays that had to be tailored to fit the minimum requirements of the narratives of historical legitimacy for the rules of Elizabeth and James. His political skepticism also clearly grew as his work developed and in Coriolanus his disbelief that it offers any real solutions to social or human problems is apparent. There is no question that the plebeians in Coriolanus are fickle, subject to demagoguery and politically immature. But they are not the ignorant and idiotic masses of the Jack Cade rebellion in one of Shakespeare's earliest plays, King Henry VI Part 2. Real ridicule, though still much attenuated compared to earlier works, is reserved for the fatuous Volscian servants. At the same time, while the play makes the plebeian case, it ultimately does not take their side, or anyone else's.

As in so much of political life, most of the charges laid against various actors by their enemies are essentially correct. The public is feckless and politically inept; the tribunes are shameless demagogues and plotters; the patricians exploiters, liars and hypocrites; and Martius himself is indeed proud, vain and self-serving to the point of abuse and, in fact, treason. All efforts to shanghai Shakespeare or Coriolanus to one political perspective or another ultimately fail because Shakespeare simply does not allow his mature texts to be read in such a tendentious, didactic manner; there is too much in them to subvert any such conclusion. To read or produce such a play as a work of agitprop, one has to do significant violence to the subtleties and complexities deep in its structure.

Does Coriolanus really offer any insights into our present-day political concerns?

I began by suggesting that the updated Balkan and multimedia setting of the new adaptation of Coriolanus might bring the play to a new audience but doesn't reveal anything new about the text itself or about our own times. It's been claimed by several critics that Coriolanus is, in many ways, Shakespeare's most relevant text to modern times because of its political content. I was particularly reminded of these claims when someone on Twitter yesterday suggested there were parallels between some aspects of Coriolanus and the unfolding tragedy of Assad's Syria and the monstrous repression being meted out to its long-suffering people. But I just don't see it. I don't think Coriolanus offers much insight into the problems of modern democracy or, for that matter, dictatorship.

True enough the play deals with a tight and complex political competition between autocratic forces, genuinely popular ones and demagogic populist opportunists. However, its concerns, while they do in some ways echo those we continue to deal with in our present day, are very firmly rooted in Shakespeare's immediate sociopolitical environment. This drama was very much a reflection of the immediate concerns of the period in which it appears to have been drafted. It could hardly be more topical. Bread riots (the Midlands Uprising and the Diggers of Shakespeare's own Warwickshire), disappointing if not disastrous foreign wars (in Ireland), upstart and possibly treasonous aristocrats (Essex, Southampton and Raleigh), and the question of the popular franchise — all key elements in the drama of Coriolanus — were among the most pressing issues in England around 1608, when the play was probably written. The ritual of popular consent for the appointment of a new Consul isn't mentioned in Plutarch, the main source for North on whom Shakespeare drew most heavily for the Roman history in this play. The emphasis on the preservation of what are cast as ancient popular prerogatives and liberties against creeping centralized government encroachment is much more of a feature if not obsession in Renaissance (and indeed much older and later) English political culture than it is Roman.

In our present day, in existing democracies we properly worry about maintaining civil liberties and individual rights against government abuses and a big-brother environment that new forms of technology may be creating. In societies, such as those in the Arab world, struggling to emerge from dictatorship, the issue is more one of creating new freedoms that never existed rather than preserving or restoring ancient freedoms. In that sense, the political issues at stake in Coriolanus are closer to our own than problems regarding the nature of monarchy and the tension between divine right and political effectiveness in Shakespeare's history plays, particularly Richard II.

So, there are indeed echoes of our present concerns in Coriolanus, but they are distant rather than direct and immediate ones. As noted above, efforts to mobilize Coriolanus by fascists, Marxists, liberals and conservatives in the modern era invariably default to distorting, oversimplifying or in some other way mammocking the play. It has more to offer us as a work of art with universal and transcendent concerns rather than specific political lessons for modern debates. Its value is in its rich character studies, the fascinating political dynamics that are most reflective of its own era, its exceptional unity and masterful integration as a drama, and brilliant use of what is, even for Shakespeare, some very powerful but idiosyncratic language. Moviegoers can and should be led back to the original text by Fiennes' adaptation of it, but those looking for important political insights into our contemporary problems are, I think, inevitably going to be disappointed. Pretending Coriolanus contains them merely distracts and detracts from the enormous artistic richness that it unquestionably does offer.

[NOTE: For even more on this subject, please see the response to this posting from Seth Duerr, Artistic Director of the York Shakespeare Company, here.]

America’s neurotic denial on Syria

http://www.nowlebanon.com/NewsArticleDetails.aspx?ID=372758

The brutality that the regime of Syrian President Bashar al-Assad has employed in crushing rebel forces and attacking civilians in Homs is yet another crucial indicator of the extent to which civil conflict in Syria has developed its own inexorable momentum. In the United States, however, the debate continues to focus on ways of avoiding facing this ugly reality and dealing with it proactively.

The policy of the Obama administration and much of the discourse within the American foreign policy establishment reflect symptoms of neurotic denial. The reality that hasn’t been fully accepted in Washington yet is that the Rubicon of civil conflict has long since been crossed and there’s no going back.
The stark choice facing the United States, and all external actors, is whether or not they care to be involved in shaping the nature and the outcome of that conflict, or prefer to remain largely passive observers and then deal with the consequences.

The loudest voices in the American conversation are still those counseling the need for a political solution to the crisis. This idea is rooted in two indefensible fantasies: first, that the present regime might be willing to cut a deal rather than pursue a military solution; and second, that there is a way to avoid the further intensification of conflict on the ground.

Built into this wishful thinking is a paradox. In theory, it might be possible to shift the calculations of some elements in the present regime toward cutting a deal with the opposition. However, the only way to achieve such a radical shift is by transforming the equation on the ground. And the only way to do that is to proactively engage in the conflict that already exists and is going to intensify—whether or not outside parties intervene directly or indirectly.

Most aspects of the American policy conversation that acknowledge the need to engage with events on the ground in Syria have focused on the humanitarian calamity and the principle of Responsibility to Protect. A respected former US official, Anne-Marie Slaughter, has proposed creating “no-kill zones” and safe havens for refugees, and even supplying arms to rebel groups “for defensive purposes” only.

Even when packaged as a humanitarian intervention, such measures would have clear strategic implications, and the idea that arms could function only in a “defensive” manner in such a conflict is, frankly, inconceivable. Meanwhile, Republican Senators John McCain and Lindsey Graham have simply advocated arming rebels, and this sentiment is growing.

Even though most in the Obama administration continue to maintain a risk-averse attitude toward Syria, it’s becoming ever clearer that entirely opting out of an ongoing conflict that cannot be reversed simply leaves the field to others. Over the weekend, US officials said they had evidence that Iran was more heavily involved in the repression than had been previously believed. They also said that the increased use of improvised explosive devices by rebels suggested “outside support” and that the conflict was therefore likely to expand.

While the capabilities of the Syrian rebel forces have been much derided, New York Times photographer Tyler Hicks, who also covered the Libya conflict, recently wrote that his strong impression was that “The Free Syrian Army is much more organized than the rebel fighters in Libya. Because of the growing number of defectors, there’s a stock of able, trained soldiers and officers mounting in Syria… but they don’t yet have the weapons to put up a realistic fight.”

Changing the equation on the ground to help create that “realistic fight” and force the regime to begin to deploy its largely Sunni military rank-and-file rather than its largely Alawite elite forces could prove a crucial turning point. It could unleash mass defections, with at least some heavy weapons presumably.

Hicks had been traveling in Syria with the late New York Times correspondent Anthony Shadid. In an interview with local activists taped a few hours before his death, Shadid opined that he thought the regime would eventually fall, but that it would take a long time. This evaluation seems entirely justified and has two vital implications.

First, the less foreign intervention there is, of whatever kind, on the side of the opposition, the longer it will take, the messier it will be, and the more people will die. Second, there is a huge opportunity for outside forces to help shape the nature and even the identity of the opposition that will eventually depose the regime. If the United States wants to leave that role to others such as Turkey, Saudi Arabia, Qatar or Islamist groups, it can hardly complain about the outcome.

The Obama administration, which seeks to reconcile American values and interests, has a major opportunity to do so in this case. Persisting with policies based on wishing things in Syria weren’t as they are fails both humanitarian values and strategic interests.

The US and the MEK: the enemy of my enemy is NOT my friend

http://www.nowlebanon.com/NewsArticleDetails.aspx?ID=378119

Has any other maxim led to greater error and remorse than the twisted logic that “the enemy of my enemy is my friend?” Yet the irony is that this malevolent cliché is actually the most charitable interpretation for why a large and bipartisan group of prominent Americans is currently lobbying on behalf of the bizarre Iranian terrorist cult the Mujahedeen e-Khalq, or MEK.

This unlikely coalition is pressuring the US government to change its policies towards the main MEK base, “Camp Ashraf,” in Iraq and thwart American and Iraqi plans for resolving that issue. More ominously, the group is pressuring to have the MEK removed from the list of designated foreign terrorist organizations.

The somewhat less charitable explanation is that many of the American MEK supporters have been paid tens of thousands of dollars for speeches and other services. Because all material dealings with the MEK are serious felonies, the Treasury Department has recently issued subpoenas to some of its key US supporters, including former Pennsylvania Governor Ed Rendell, former Department of Homeland Security chief Tom Ridge, former FBI Director Louis Freeh, and former Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Gen. Hugh Shelton. Rendell’s office, for example, admits he has received $160,000 for such efforts over the past year.

Other prominent MEK supporters include Republican notables such as the former Attorney General Michael Mukasey, former Homeland Security Advisor Fran Townsend, former White House Chief of Staff Andrew Card, and former New York City Mayor Rudolph Giuliani, many of whom are self-styled anti-terrorism crusaders. On the Democratic side, MEK backers include former Vermont Governor Howard Dean, former New Mexico Governor Bill Richardson, and former Senior Allied Commander of NATO Wesley Clark.

The MEK is on the terrorism list for good reason. According to a State Department report published in 1997, the organization “assassinated at least six American citizens, supported the takeover of the US Embassy [in Tehran], and opposed the release of the American hostages.” Since then, the organization has been implicated in numerous terrorist attacks inside Iran and elsewhere, and for many years its main sponsor was Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein.

A further, and more disturbing, motivation for this indefensible championing of the MEK was recently revealed by NBC News. It reported that US officials said “deadly attacks on Iranian nuclear scientists are being carried out by an Iranian dissident group [the MEK] that is financed, trained and armed by Israel’s secret service.”

For some, it seems, although the MEK may be a terrorist group, it has the “right targets,” and therefore should be supported rather than banned.

But the MEK is not simply a run-of-the-mill dissident group employing terrorist tactics. It is a bizarre and dangerous cult run by a strange and fanatical couple, Massoud and Maryam Rajavi, that reportedly keeps its members in total isolation, forbids marriages and imposes divorces, and engages in disturbing “self-criticism” sessions. Its ideology is a twisted syncretism of Shia fundamentalism, Marxism and feminism run amok. Numerous observers have aptly compared its mindset to that of the Khmer Rouge.

While the MEK opposes the foul dictatorship in Tehran, its own structure and practices reveal disturbingly similar undemocratic practices, and indeed far worse. For a simple primer on how the MEK conducts itself, readers should consult Elizabeth Rubin’s 2003 New York Times report, “The Cult of Rajavi.”

The Treasury Department is to be commended for launching a long-overdue investigation into the MEK’s well-funded US lobby, as well as its large payments to exceptionally prominent Americans who certainly ought to know better. Some have claimed ignorance about the MEK’s history and practices. However, any 10-year-old with an Internet connection could discover the truth about this nefarious organization within minutes of casual browsing.

Were the State Department to de-list the organization as a terrorist group, the official American approach to international terrorism would be shorn of any pretense of principle. Moral clarity on terrorism would be abandoned in favor of the logic of “they’re our terrorists, so they’re acceptable,” simply on the basis that their targets are the repulsive regime in Tehran and its nuclear program, possibly under Israeli state sponsorship.

For far too long, MEK front organizations have operated with impunity in the United States. Prominent Americans have accepted cash payments that with regard to other designated terrorist groups would have long since led to major prosecutions. Rather than de-listing the MEK from the terrorism list, the United States government should vigorously pursue its investigation into those Americans who have accepted payments from its front organizations.

By legitimizing the MEK, Washington would lose almost all credibility when it comes to opposing terrorism. The enemy of my enemy is by no means necessarily my friend. That way madness lies.

Don’t discount a third intifada

http://www.nowlebanon.com/NewsArticleDetails.aspx?ID=370070

Is a third Palestinian intifada coming in the foreseeable future? An Israeli Foreign Ministry intelligence report circulated in the government last week and leaked over the weekend to Ha’aretz suggests it could well be. The report is right, and its assessment should make sobering reading for Israeli officials and citizens alike.

The report holds that there is little appetite on behalf of the mainstream Palestinian leadership in Ramallah, or among the majority of Palestinians, for “a violent escalation with Israel.” All the evidence points in that direction. However, the report allegedly continues, “The continuing freeze of the diplomatic process, combined with any drastic Israeli moves in the military and/or economic realm and the continuing stormy situation in the Middle East, could bring about a change in this approach.”

What the report implicitly recognizes is that the situation on the ground is simply untenable. Despite the intentions of the Ramallah leadership or the Palestinian majority, the situation is building to such a state of tension that even a small spark could unleash waves of protest. Such protests could well begin nonviolently, but sooner rather than later would, as they always do, elicit a violent response from occupation forces.

The occupation, after all, is in essence a system of discipline and control over millions of subjugated noncitizens by a foreign army. Israeli forces ultimately have little recourse other than violence to suppress Palestinian protests—whether these are non-violent, symbolically violent (as in stone throwing against heavily armored troops) or genuinely resemble riots. The bottom line is that no people in the world will continue to sit idly by as their country is colonized before their very eyes and they continue to endure decades of foreign occupation with no end in sight.

Israel’s government has proven remarkably shortsighted in recent months, assuming it wants to avoid another escalation on the ground. Settlement activity has increased, including plans for building in sensitive areas, such as the E-1 corridor and other strategic locations that threaten the viability of any future Palestinian state. Leaving aside for a moment international law, under which all settlement activity is illegal, the Israeli government has proven incapable or unwilling to enforce its own laws about settlement-building and court orders to dismantle “unauthorized outposts.” It has even been retroactively recognizing hundreds of settlement housing units built without permission.

The latest illustration of the core of the problem is an Israeli plan to build a 475-kilometer rail system throughout the occupied territories. It even says it intends to demolish Palestinian solar energy installations because they were built “without the permission” of occupation authorities.

What this yet again demonstrates is that the Israeli government, for all intents and purposes and no matter what it says in public, continues to treat the occupied territories as Israeli property. Through its actions, it is sending a clear message that it has no interest in the eventual creation of a real Palestinian state. Its conduct makes it very difficult to argue that Israel does not eventually intend to either annex large chunks of the West Bank, making Palestinian statehood impossible, or to maintain the status quo that is radically separate and unequal in every respect along ethnic lines and which denies Palestinians their basic human and national rights.

A number of recent incidents have illustrated the kind of tension points that could provide the spark for another uprising, even if the Ramallah-based leadership and the Palestinian majority don’t want one. The hunger strike of Islamic Jihad activist Khader Adnan, whose death was averted by a last-minute deal with the Israeli authorities stipulating that he will be either released or charged by mid-April, conceivably had that potential. So have planned provocations by Jewish extremists at holy sites in occupied East Jerusalem and the killing of an unarmed Palestinian protester at an Israeli checkpoint.

The Palestinian leadership in Ramallah has three simultaneous initiatives at the moment: talks with Israel that no one believes will bear fruit in the foreseeable future, potential further action at the United Nations, and national reconciliation with Hamas. None of these seem to offer the prospect of much progress, and reconciliation with Hamas, so long as the organization does not change its policies, comes at a huge price internationally and diplomatically.

Israel, on the other hand, seems to have no initiative at all, and no realistic vision of the future except continuing to expand and entrench the occupation. But underlying the new intelligence report is the understanding that the status quo is simply untenable. If it continues, sooner or later something will trigger another confrontation on the ground that is almost certain to spiral quickly into violence.

If that happens, there will be plenty of blame to go around. But if the Israelis find themselves caught up in another spasm of bloodshed, they need only look in the mirror to discover who bears the greatest responsibility.

Muslims must speak up against the Kashgari scandal

http://www.ibishblog.com/article/2012/02/21/muslims_must_speak_against_kashgari_scandal

It’s hard to know where to begin in cataloging the outrages associated with the arrest of Hamza Kashgari. The 23-year-old Saudi columnist was recently detained on trumped-up “blasphemy” charges, for which he potentially faces execution.

First, Saudi extremists took umbrage at some tweets in which he expressed admiration, disapproval and bewilderment at various aspects of the Prophet Mohammed’s legendary life. This outrage was orchestrated by clerics as part of a campaign to increase their power.

Second, the Saudi state reacted by appeasing the fanatics and ordering Kashgari’s arrest for “blasphemy.” In effect, they confirmed the ability of extremists to dictate the agenda of, if not bully, the government on religious matters.

Third, Kashgari had already left the country to evade persecution, but was apprehended by Malaysian authorities in Kuala Lumpur, possibly with the assistance of Interpol, and returned to Saudi Arabia. So at least one foreign government and possibly a multilateral policing agency have connived in this travesty.

Fourth, the Saudi government says it may seek the death penalty for Kashgari. There can be no freedom of conscience or religion where blasphemy is a crime, but the Saudi state has never respected or acknowledged either of those principles. Yet Kashgari hasn’t committed blasphemy. All he did was express complex religious feelings. And it is shocking that a government would consider executing, or even prosecuting, anyone for either of these “crimes.”

Fifth, while there have been some limited efforts to protest this scandalous injustice and intercede on behalf of Kashgari’s life and liberty, they have thus far been insufficient. Muslim states, governments and individuals have an especial, and urgent, responsibility to categorically oppose this outrage.

Muslims, including Saudi officials and citizens, are properly vociferous in denouncing Islamophobic misrepresentations of Islam as an inherently violent and intolerant religion. Doctrinally and historically, it is clearly not. However, the reputation of Muslims and Islam is also, and far too often, called into severe disrepute by the conduct of some important Muslim-majority states claiming to act in the name or defense of Islam.

The persecution of Kashgari, not by cynical Saudi clerics weeping hysterically on YouTube, but by the state itself, is another disturbing reflection of this phenomenon. One cannot claim to be tolerant or opposed to violence while considering beheading someone for expressing mild religious doubts about a figure who, in his own lifetime, reportedly insisted on his own status as a fallible human being.

The government of Saudi Arabia doesn’t represent the norm or authority for the Muslims of the world. But it is a large and influential Muslim state and is claiming to act on behalf of Islam in this ugly affair.

Silence implies consent. If Muslims don’t want their religion to be misrepresented by such actions, they must openly and loudly repudiate them. And, if there is any virtue or truth in religion, it hardly needs enforcement on pain of death.

The good news is that because he is a relatively prominent Saudi citizen, and the case has become a minor international cause célèbre, Kashgari is unlikely to be executed. The pattern in such cases suggests that if he shows “repentance” or there is an international outcry, or both, Kashgari’s sentence may initially be harsh but will almost certainly be commuted.

The most likely outcome is that Kashgari will end up sometime in the next few years permanently relocated to another country. Kashgari is lucky that he’s not from a remote village or irrelevant family or, worse, a migrant worker. In that case he might really need to start contemplating bearing his neck to the sword.

This scandal is indicative of a broader growth of intolerance in Saudi social and religious rhetoric of late, which also comes in the context of Shia unrest in the Eastern Governorate of Qatif. Extremist clerics have been upping the ante at every stage over the past few months, and clearly believe that they have just won an important victory. They are now demanding the cancellation of cultural and book festivals. At public events, their thuggish, unauthorized and un-uniformed street forces, known as the “Mohtasbeen,” have been reportedly trying to upstage the official religious orthodoxy beadles, the “Muttaween.”

While non-Muslims cannot honestly claim that Saudi Arabia represents Islam, Muslims cannot dismiss the kingdom as irrelevant either. Saudi Arabia’s religious and cultural influence, byproducts of its wealth and custodianship of the two most holy Muslim sites, is undeniable. The extremist shift in Saudi social and religious attitudes therefore has troubling implications.

Nobody can force the Saudi state to behave in a reasonable manner if it doesn’t want to. But all other Muslims can and should make it clear that they strongly disapprove of the persecution of Hamza Kashgari and the mentality that lies behind such actions.

Hamas of contradictions

http://www.nowlebanon.com/NewsArticleDetails.aspx?ID=364757

The growing split that has been emerging within the leadership of Hamas has exploded into a bitter public feud. It was prompted an agreement reached last week in Qatar between the head of Hamas’ political bureau, Khaled Meshaal, and the Palestinian Authority president, Mahmoud Abbas. According to the deal, Abbas would take on the additional role of prime minister until elections are held later this year.

Since the beginning of the Arab uprisings, the divergence of interests between Hamas’ leadership in Gaza and its leadership abroad has been steadily intensifying. External leaders, Meshaal in particular, have come under increasing pressure to adapt to regional transformations, particularly the growing sectarian split in the Middle East.

It has become impossible for Hamas to remain friendly with Sunni Arab governments and Islamist movements while being simultaneously allied to Syria and Iran. The days in which the mythology of an “axis of resistance” could rationalize a Sunni Islamist movement being part of an Iranian-led—essentially Shia—alliance are long gone. Hamas leaders proved unable to side with Bashar al-Assad while their colleagues in the Syrian Muslim Brotherhood are a key component in the uprising against his regime. No Hamas official remains in the movement’s Damascus headquarters.

The external Hamas leadership has a branding and identity crisis, and needs desperately to find new patrons and headquarters, and a new international political and strategic profile. Hence Meshaal has been intensively courting Qatar, Jordan and Egypt, among others, seeking alternative sources of support and a new regional orientation.

The Gaza leadership does not share much of this crisis. Their rule is effectively unchallenged, and they continue to draw on various sources of income. From their perspective, there is no immediate need for a major reorientation. They argue that sooner rather than later their fellow Islamists will gain unchallenged power in Egypt and other key Arab states, and that it makes no sense to compromise with Abbas or anyone else at this stage. This is a gamble the external leadership cannot afford.

Many Gaza leaders clearly think the external leadership is making momentous decisions for its own purposes, but at their political expense. Resentment has boiled over. Already, last year a Hamas hardliner in Gaza, Mahmoud Zahhar, was disciplined for insisting that the primary leadership of Hamas was the one in Gaza. That proved to be a foretaste of the current crisis.

The “Change and Reform” bloc in Gaza, which includes Zahhar and the de facto prime minister, Ismail Haniyyeh, immediately reacted to the agreement with Abbas by issuing a blistering “legal memorandum.” The document laid out detailed and categorical objections to the accord, declaring it illegal. Zahhar, speaking on behalf of many and openly attacking Meshaal, said that “no one in the organization had been consulted,” and described the deal as “a mistake” which “could not be implemented” and “a real crisis.”

Meanwhile, Haniyyeh visited several Gulf states, and more importantly Iran, to shore up Iranian support, despite the dispute over the Assad regime. If the Gaza leadership is to mount an effective pushback against this new initiative, which enjoys Arab Gulf backing, it is going to require significant support from Iran. The Iranians might have incentives to continue to fund Hamas in Gaza to try to sabotage the Arab-led Palestinian reconciliation agreement, and to retain Hamas as a potential chit in the face of a possible Israeli or American attack on its nuclear facilities.

How the crisis in Hamas develops depends on several factors. A close ally of Meshaal, Ahmed Youssef, has implied that Qatar promised strong financial backing in return for the agreement. If that is delivered, especially if it is augmented by aid from Saudi Arabia and other Gulf states, it will require a great deal of Iranian and other leverage for the Gaza-based leaders to prevail.

The position of the Hamas paramilitary Ezzeddine al-Qassam Brigades will also be crucial. Its leaders, Ahmed Jabari and Marwan Issa, have traditionally deferred to the leadership of the political bureau, and reportedly urged Meshaal not to step down as its chief. But they have also expressed dismay at some of Meshaal’s recent comments regarding the tactical value of nonviolent resistance.

The power struggle in Hamas reflects regional rivalries and strikingly divergent interests that have developed in the context of the Arab uprisings. But a complete split in the movement is highly improbable, and one side is going to prevail.

Whether the agreement with Abbas is implemented or not, Hamas will only go as far as it absolutely must to adjust to new realities. But relying on states like Qatar, Egypt and Jordan will necessitate very different behavior than being a client of Syria and Iran. And Hamas leaders counting on the Arab Spring turning into an “Islamic Awakening” that fulfills their ideological fantasies are spending more time reading coffee grounds than the emerging regional order.

Kuwait’s troubling election

http://www.nowlebanon.com/NewsArticleDetails.aspx?ID=361870

Last week’s election in Kuwait was the most interesting, but in many ways also the most depressing, in that country’s history. Technically, the process was better than ever, but the results are deeply troubling.

Much of Kuwaiti society appears to have retreated to its most primal identity groupings, and it seems fractured as never before. Tensions between urban constituencies and more rural tribesmen boiled over into vandalism as the election tent of Mohammed Al-Juwaihel—a candidate who repeatedly suggested that Bedouin tribesmen, especially of the large Mutairi clan, were fundamentally disloyal—was burned to the ground. He nonetheless won a seat in the Third District (out of five in Kuwait, with 10 seats each), which has been considered a diverse constituency, either in spite of, or worse still because of, his aggressively intolerant rhetoric.

Religious sectarianism was also stronger than ever, with Shia candidates hoping, probably in vain, to protect their interests by continuing to ally with the royal family. They now face empowered opponents such as Mohammed Hayef Al-Mutairi, elected in the Fourth District, who specialize in vitriolic anti-Shia demagoguery.

The Muslim Brotherhood won four seats and their close allies another three, beating their all-time best of six. It marks a major comeback from 2009 when the Brotherhood was down to only one parliamentarian. The Muslim Brotherhood and other Islamist politicians deftly claimed credit for protests late last year that finally brought down the deeply unpopular and long-serving prime minister, even though they were late-comers to the movement and their grandstanding showed the crassest opportunism. But clearly their strategy of hijacking the protests worked well at the polls.

Pro-government forces and liberals, such as they are, both took a severe drubbing at the hands of various forms of conservative and identity-candidates. Most depressingly, there are no women at all in the new parliament, with all four incumbent females ousted.

This situation is a prescription for deadlock as the ruling family retains most power and can, and probably will, dissolve parliament before long if it goes too far in harassing the executive. Knowing this, the majority of opposition parliamentarians may keep their powder dry for now, not wanting to be seen as a source of constant deadlock. But sooner or later tensions will almost certainly again boil over.

But the biggest scandal in Kuwait, and one that has received very little local, regional and international attention, is the plight of the stateless in that country. There are an estimated 120,000 people “without citizenship” (bidoun jinsiya), among 1.6 million citizens, who are themselves divided into a hierarchy of classifications that allot varying rights and responsibilities. Most bidoun are by any measure, and under stated provisions of Kuwaiti law, entitled to citizenship, but live in limbo without basic rights and legal status.

Very few Kuwaiti politicians and organizations pay the least attention to this issue, unless it is to attack the bidoun and oppose their rights. Bidoun have been increasingly organizing and protesting during the past year, but the government recently announced that they were not allowed to protest and that any who did would be deported. It is not clear, however, to where they could be deported.

In Kuwait, even peaceful protest is a right reserved solely to those classified as “citizens.” Unlike protesting “citizens,” bidoun have been routinely beaten, tear gassed and rounded up without charge or legal representation.

Bidoun issues are handled by a committee headed by a noted opponent of their rights. This committee announced reforms in November 2010 that remain almost entirely unfulfilled. Last year the government promised to address the stateless issue, but added that only 34,000 bidoun were eligible to be naturalized. It is estimated that 100,000 applications are pending but only 16,000 have been approved in the past two decades. Kuwait has never approved more than 2,000 such requests in any given year.

The victory of Islamist and tribal opposition candidates, lack of sympathy for the bidoun in most of Kuwaiti society and in the royal family, and intensified divisions among Kuwaiti citizens do not bode well for the bidoun, who have precious few allies. The shameful silence on this issue by the United States, one of the only countries with any real influence in Kuwait, only makes matters worse.

The Kuwaiti elections were fascinating, and in a grim way even entertaining. However, they offer little hope for the most vulnerable in the country—the bidoun and also the large numbers of migrant, and especially migrant domestic, workers. Government promises to address the plight of these communities have proven hollow in the past. Nothing in the election results gives any real hope that these urgent moral issues will be seriously addressed in the near future. Kuwaiti society appears more divided than ever, and suspicion, hatred and demagoguery are the order of the day.

Safer Side by Side: Why Israel Needs Palestine

http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2012/04/02/safer-side-by-side-why-israel-needs-palestine.html

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The “Altalena,” full of weapons for the Jewish militant group Irgun, burns off the coast of Tel Aviv in June of 1948 after being shelled by what was to become the Israel Defense Forces, then called the Haganah (-)

He added that Netanuyahu’s 2009 Bar-Ilan speech, which seemingly endorsed the two-state goal, was aimed exclusively at foreign audiences but that Palestinian statehood “was not brought up for discussion in the government, nor will it be discussed.” “This is not the government’s position,” he stated bluntly. All the evidence suggests he’s correct.

The “threat” posed by a potential Palestinian state is the most common Israeli objection to a two-state solution. But the occupation itself is the main source of insecurity and lack of peace.

The mainstream Palestinian leadership in Ramallah has staked its future on a two-state agreement and an end to the occupation. Through the Arab Peace Initiative, the rest of the Arab world signaled unanimously that an Israeli-Palestinian final status agreement would also mean normalization between Israel and the Arab states. Plainly, most Palestinians, other Arabs and their governments would welcome an end to this destabilizing conflict.

It is frequently alleged that a core barrier to peace is the Palestinian refusal to recognize Israel. But the Palestine Liberation Organization—the sole legitimate representative of the Palestinian people—did, in fact, formally recognize Israel in 1993. Israel, in return, only recognized the PLO as the representative of the Palestinian people. Israel has never recognized a Palestinian state, or, in any formal manner, the Palestinian right to statehood.

Israeli security officials acknowledge that the Palestinian security cooperation and performance have been excellent. Attacks against Israelis in Palestinian-controlled areas in the West Bank have fallen to virtually zero.

But this security cooperation is frequently ignored and emphasis instead placed on the actions of militants in Gaza. The PA has not been able to contain the Gazan violence because Hamas runs Gaza. The PA lost control of Gaza for several reasons: its own miscalculations; Israel’s refusal to allow the PA to develop elite counterterrorism forces; and insufficient support from half-hearted patrons like the United States (Hamas’s patrons lavished enormous support on it). But most importantly, groups like Hamas need the absence of peace to thrive, even in Gaza.

The PA won’t be able to achieve complete security control—a key responsibility of a sovereign government—without possessing the rights and prerogatives of sovereignty. Israelis point to the Altalena incident in which the fledgling Israeli state confronted the extremist Irgun group, forcing it to disarm. This confrontation took place after Israeli independence, not before the establishment of the state, when there was ample cooperation between mainstream Jewish organizations and terrorist groups like Irgun.

In the event of real Palestinian independence, Palestinian public opinion, the Palestinian security forces, and Arab governments would not allow any campaign of violence against Israelis to undermine or threaten the new state. Palestinian militants justify violence as resistance to the occupation, and ending it would remove such rationalizations. Islamist groups, just like far right-wing Israeli political parties, would be disarmed and pursue their aims through peaceful and democratic means.

In the limited areas under its control in the West Bank and without real sovereign authority, the PA has already proven its ability to do what Israel did after independence: reign in militants and enforce the rule of a single, disciplined security force. In the event of independence, this could and would be replicated in Gaza.

It should be added that “security” arguments typically focus on the predictably negative consequences of unilateral actions, but clearly unilateralism is a recipe for disaster.  Building Palestinian independence does not require immediate Israeli withdrawal, and any agreement with the PA would not be unilateral but mutual. The correct security analogy is not Lebanon or Gaza, but the peace treaties with Egypt and Jordan, which have been maintained by all three countries. The Palestinian state would have an even greater incentive than the Egyptians and Jordanians to uphold such an agreement because not doing so would undermine or even threaten its own continued existence.

A mutual peace agreement will offset Israel’s need to live on the permanent knife-edge of potential war and uprising as well as in the morally, socially and culturally corrupting position of occupier. It will allow the Palestinians to live in freedom and dignity, and remove any excuse for others to claim to be confronting Israel on behalf of the Palestinian cause.  Peace may be a gamble, but endless wars are a sure loser.

Brace for the worst in Bahrain

http://www.nowlebanon.com/NewsArticleDetails.aspx?ID=356316

The stage seems to be set for February and March to be the scene of a significant intensification of tensions in Bahrain. The period will mark the one-year anniversaries of the protest movement, the government crackdown, and the “Peninsula Shield” intervention by Saudi-led Gulf Cooperation Council forces. More importantly, recent developments have pushed almost entirely away from substantive moves toward national accommodation or reconciliation.

Since the failure of the “national dialogue” last summer, clashes between security forces and largely Shia protesters have regularly taken placed during emotional funerals following the deaths of individuals under suspicious circumstances.

The report of the Bahrain Independent Commission of Inquiry, which found that security forces had engaged in the excessive use of force, appears to have done nothing to inhibit the use of tear gas and other suppressive measures. Indeed, this behavior seems to have intensified. At least eight protesters have been killed since the report was filed, mostly by tear gas inhalation, including reportedly a baby.

In their own defense, the authorities have pointed to changes in the leadership of the security services, the hiring of Western policing experts, and the investigation of a number of deaths in custody. They cite the impending trial of five security officers, none of them Bahraini, for the death of a blogger while being held by the police. And King Hamad has proposed some limited constitutional reforms that are supposed to enhance the power of the legislature.

None of this has impressed any major actors in the opposition. The main Shia opposition grouping, Al-Wefaq, has continued to boycott parliament and the by-elections intended to fill the seats opened by the mass resignation of its parliamentarians. There is still no vehicle for meaningful dialogue between the government and opposition forces. Hardliners on both sides appear to have been gaining ground over those interested in a meaningful compromise.

There are signs of a serious hardening of the position of important opposition voices and groups. Most significantly, on January 12, Nabeel Rajab, the president of the Bahrain Center for Human Rights and a figure with both national and international credibility, gave a speech that seemed to break new ground for the mainstream opposition. He stated bluntly, “Our problem is with the king of Bahrain.” Addressing the king directly, he said, “If you cannot get rid of the heavy weights of your regime and the crimes that your regime has committed, then it is the appropriate time now for you to leave.”

It is not clear if he was calling for abdication or the end of the monarchy. However, the statement brings calls for what amount to regime change, which had previously been restricted to smaller and more radical opposition groups such as Al-Haq, much closer to the rhetoric of the mainstream Bahraini opposition. It may or may not prove to be a milestone, but it certainly represented a significant intensification of demands. It is worth noting that Rajab was beaten, detained and hospitalized following a January 6 protest.

There also appears to be more activity and influence by the shadowy, underground opposition groups calling themselves the “February 14 Youth Coalition,” whose rhetoric emphasizes a not-clearly defined “Right of Self-Determination.” The increased activity of the “February 14” groups demonstrates a growing impatience at the street and popular levels with mainstream organizations like Al-Wefaq that now are perceived as too conciliatory by some activists.

Some pro-government hardliners have also been escalating their rhetoric and pushing for stronger confrontation. When a civilian court overturned the death sentences handed down against two protesters by a military tribunal, extremist elements associated with the pro-government National Unity Gathering called for their lynching and created mock gallows in which they hanged photographs of the men.

Not enough has been done to defuse tensions, and an obvious step the government has so far unwisely avoided is a broad-based amnesty for the hundreds of people arrested and charged in connection with protests, and in many cases the simple exercise of free expression. In particular, the government cannot hope to open a meaningful dialogue with an opposition, 21 of whose leaders were jailed in a mass trial last year that did not distinguish between moderate and extreme figures. Their harsh sentences were upheld on September 28.

The release of important figures such as Abdulhadi Abdulla Hubail Alkhawaja, the former president and co-founder of the Bahrain Center for Human Rights, and, above all, Ibrahim Sharif—the sole Sunni defendant in the mass trial, who is the leader of the social democratic reform group Al-Waad—would be an indispensible step away from confrontation. It is probably a sine qua non for real dialogue. Without such serious measures, the situation in Bahrain is set to deteriorate significantly in the coming months.