LCCC ENGLISH DAILY NEWS BULLETIN
March 07/09

Bible Reading of the day.
Holy Gospel of Jesus Christ according to Saint Matthew 4,12-17.23-25. When he heard that John had been arrested, he withdrew to Galilee.He left Nazareth and went to live in Capernaum by the sea, in the region of Zebulun and Naphtali, that what had been said through Isaiah the prophet might be fulfilled: Land of Zebulun and land of Naphtali, the way to the sea, beyond the Jordan, Galilee of the Gentiles, the people who sit in darkness have seen a great light, on those dwelling in a land overshadowed by death light has arisen." From that time on, Jesus began to preach and say, "Repent, for the kingdom of heaven is at hand."He went around all of Galilee, teaching in their synagogues, proclaiming the gospel of the kingdom, and curing every disease and illness among the people. His fame spread to all of Syria, and they brought to him all who were sick with various diseases and racked with pain, those who were possessed, lunatics, and paralytics, and he cured them. And great crowds from Galilee, the Decapolis, Jerusalem, and Judea, and from beyond the Jordan followed him.

Free Opinions, Releases, letters & Special Reports
Winner takes all in Lebanon? No thanks!.By Habib C. Malik 06/03/09
Taqiyya Revisited: A Response to the Critics.By Raymond Ibrahim 06/03/09
How Do We Reach Muslims who are Susceptible to Islamist Propaganda?By: Dr. Sami Alrabaa 06/03/09
Siniora, UN envoy discuss progress on Resolution 1701-By Nicholas Kimbrell 06/03/09
A Palestinian unity government is best for Israel.By Zvi Bar'el 06/03/09
The Syria Temptation-Wall Street Journal 06/03/09

Latest News Reports From Miscellaneous Sources for March 06/09
Feltman's Message to Syria: Lebanon is for the Lebanese-Naharnet
Jumblat: Bashir Warrant Stresses Importance of Accountability-Naharnet
Cabinet Postpones Discussion of MoU, Forms Follow-up Committee-Naharnet
Hizbullah Takes Wait-and-See Approach as Britain Seeks to Encourage it to Renounce 'Violence'-Naharnet
Churches Launch Charter for Political Conduct-Naharnet
Aridi Visits Dahieh, Denies Link to Elections-Naharnet
US envoys seek to reassure Lebanon-AFP
Israel: Syria's demand to get munitions from seized ship 'insolent'-Ynetnews
Britain open to engaging in direct talks with Hizbullah-AFP
Cabinet delays MOU on Hariri tribunal-Daily Star
Lebanese churches ink charter to return political life to its 'rightful path-Daily Star
Nigerian militants abduct Lebanese builder-AFP
IMF calls on Lebanon to either cut spending or raise taxes.Daily Star
Greek company accused of burying waste on Jiyyeh beach-Daily Star
Feminist Collective takes aim at male-centered politics-Daily Star
Israel to hand over cluster bomb maps - Israeli media-Daily Star

Feltman's Message to Syria: Lebanon is for the Lebanese
Naharnet/Acting Assistant Secretary of State for Near Eastern Affairs Jeffrey Feltman said Friday he was carrying a clear message to Syria: "Lebanon is for the Lebanese." "Our trip to Syria... is an opportunity for us to start addressing these concerns and using engagement as a tool to promote our objectives in the region," Feltman said after meeting President Michel Suleiman and Prime Minister Fouad Saniora. "We'll talk to the Syrians about many, many issues, but about Lebanon, the message is clear: The U.S. and the international community... all agree Lebanon is for the Lebanese," he added. "That's the basic message."
"My visit here today underscores an important reality -- the United States' support for a sovereign and independent Lebanon remains unwavering," the former U.S. ambassador to Lebanon said. Feltman said Washington's overtures to the Syrian regime were in line with the policy of new U.S. President Barack Obama engage states in the region, including its foes. "The President has said he wants to sustain in principle engagement with all states in the region and that includes Syria," he went on to say. Feltman stressed that Washington had a "long list" of concerns that he and fellow envoy Daniel Shapiro planned to discuss with Syrian officials when they meet at the weekend. U.S. officials have repeatedly maintained that renewed ties with Syria, which for years held sway in Lebanese politics, would not be at the expense of Lebanon. Since 2006, the United States has committed to giving 410 million dollars in military assistance to Lebanon as it seeks to bolster the government.
Feltman and Shapiro met upon arrival Thursday evening with parliamentary majority leader Saad Hariri, the son and political heir of ex-premier Rafik Hariri, who was killed in a massive Beirut car bombing in 2005. Their visit to Beirut ahead of a trip to Damascus was a message to Syria that there is no change in the American position toward Syria. It was also a message to Damascus that the fundamental ground rules of the U.S. administration were still valid.
Feltman said it was appropriate to meet first with Hariri as the tribunal is in its first week of operation in The Hague. "The United States welcomes this important step towards ending impunity for political assassinations in Lebanon and as a concrete sign that Lebanon's sovereignty is non-negotiable," he said.
Feltman also hailed the June 7 parliamentary election in Lebanon. "This will be an important milestone in Lebanese history," he said. "The United States will support the Lebanese authorities' efforts to ensure that they are free, fair, transparent and unmarred by political violence." Beirut, 06 Mar 09, 14:37

You … the agents and traitors
Date: March 6th, 2009 Source: Future News
What the reaction of the agitators of menacing fingers and raising voices be, to the decision of Washington to send Jeffrey Feltman to Damascus as interlocutor of the new dialogue with the Syrian régime, particularly that this decision has been communicated from Tel Aviv?
"Feltman" the name of who was believed to dress the government of the political resistance at the time of the war of July 2006, this same government that refused to submit to the dictations of Syria and that committed to preserve the "second independence" built on sweat and blood of the Lebanese.
It is legitimate for all Lebanese to interrogate the alliance of March 14 on the nature of its relations with the American administration, although it’s holding and results are clear as the water of rock, the least with the parliamentary majority. On the other hand, the relation of the alliance of March 8 with Iran and Syria doesn't support any evaluation.
It is not about a temporary phenomenon, because it touches to the very foundations of the politics and not to the verbal gyms of use. The answer to this question is of high importance because it could help the Lebanese reinforce their choice in the next elections. Those that say they desire from the American administration to do this or that are not those who say that "the Syrian régime" or "Wilayet el Faqih” requires or dictates on us to do this or that. Hence from there, it is easy to discern those that receive dictation of their decisions of those that are working for a sovereign Lebanon, a "Lebanon first."
The Lebanese know the traitors and perfectly know that their politics is that of follow-the-leader attitude. We know their role when our bodies were scattered in fragments in the sky of Beirut and our blood flowed in the streets, whereas Damascus negotiated on the wine of the Golan, while inciting its allies inside Lebanon to bring up the bids.
We saw them at the time we turned the world in quest of help to save Lebanon. At that same moment, the ruler of Damascus implored America to send an ambassador to his country, and announced his ardent desire to negotiate with the Hebrew state, while our own brothers qualified the government of the resistance and independence as "Feltman government."

Jumblat: Bashir Warrant Stresses Importance of Accountability
Naharnet/Democratic Gathering leader Walid Jumblat said Friday that an arrest warrant issued by an international court against Sudanese President Omar al-Bashir stresses the importance of accountability. "It stresses the importance of holding those involved accountable for mass murder," Jumblat said in a statement released on Friday. An International Criminal Court arrest warrant issued Wednesday against Bashir opened up a global divide on how war crimes justice is administered.
The ICC sought the arrest of Bashir for war crimes and crimes against humanity during a five-year-long crackdown in Darfur, which the United Nations says has left up to 300,000 people dead and forced about three million out of their homes. Jumblat said Bashir "dragged Sudan into a deadlock because of his insistence on sending troops to Darfur." These soldiers "carried out atrocities against civilians that cannot be tolerated in any form," Jumblat added. In earlier remarks, Jumblat underlined the need for compromise with rival March 8 Forces and said a thaw in ties between Saudi Arabia and Syria should help strengthen stability in Lebanon. Relations between Syria and Saudi Arabia have worsened following the 2005 assassination of ex-PM Rafik Hariri. In August 2006, the row grew deeper after Assad gave a speech criticizing Arab leaders for their failure to support Hizbullah in the Israeli war on Lebanon, calling them "half-men." Relations briefly improved in March 2007 after Assad moved to quell the crisis, describing ties between the two countries as "historic" and "longstanding." Jumblat saw the exchange of visits between Riyadh and Damascus as a "good thing," that could lead to decreased tension among Lebanese communities. In remarks published in several Beirut dailies on Friday, Jumblat did not rule out joining a new unity government after the June 7 parliamentary election, which is seen a major landmark. But the Druze leader said he would first have to "consult" with his allies in the ruling March 14 coalition. Jumblat believed that while winning would be a "moral boost" for March 14 Forces, losing "is not the end of the world." Jumblat said he was not worried by the rapprochement between the United States and Syria. Beirut, 06 Mar 09, 08:33

Cabinet Postpones Discussion of MoU, Forms Follow-up Committee
Naharnet/Cabinet postponed discussion of the Memorandum of Understanding (MoU) with the Special Tribunal for Lebanon till next week and agreed to form a committee to study the issue. Information Minister Tareq Mitri said on Thursday after the cabinet session that Ministers Mohammed Fneish, Ibrahim Najjar and Khaled Qabbani were tasked with studying the MoU and making proposals for next week's session. The memorandum proposed by the Justice Ministry seeks to regulate relations between the Lebanese judiciary and the STL's general prosecutor. Last week, cabinet delayed the decision to sign the MoU after March 8 cabinet ministers argued that a clause in the draft text of the memorandum would "expose Lebanon and make every Lebanese person subjected to scrutiny."
A March 8 minister told the daily An Nahar that the word "local authorities" under the MoU draft "could include all people, starting with the head of state all the way to the last politician." The third clause states that Lebanese authorities guarantee that the office of the tribunals' Attorney General is free from any interference during investigation in Lebanon and that it is provided with the necessary assistance to help its mission succeed. Mitri also told reporters after the cabinet session held at Baabda Palace that President Michel Suleiman accepted an invitation to attend the Arab summit that will be held in Doha on March 29 and the Arab-Latin summit also to be held in the Qatari capital two days later. Beirut, 05 Mar 09, 20:59

Hizbullah Takes Wait-and-See Approach as Britain Seeks to Encourage it to Renounce 'Violence'
Naharnet/Britain's government spokesman said a decision to engage in direct contacts with Hizbullah's political wing was aimed at encouraging the Shiite group to steer clear from violence and play a more democratic role. "Our aim is to encourage [Hizbullah] to stay away from violence and play a constructive, peaceful and democratic role in Lebanese politics," John Wilks told As Safir daily in remarks published Friday. Foreign Office minister Bill Rammell told a parliamentary committee hearing on Wednesday that his country is prepared to engage in direct contacts with the party's political wing, ever since the Shiite group became part of a national unity government last year. London has had no official talks with Hizbullah since 2005, and last July added its military wing to a blacklist of designated terrorist groups.
Hizbullah sources told As Safir that it was waiting what steps Britain would take after Rammell's announcement. "In the past months, we were reconsidering our policy towards Hizbullah based on British interests," Wilks told the newspaper. The change of policy has nothing to do with the policies adopted by the administration of U.S. President Barack Obama and its openness to Syria and Iran, he stressed. Asked if the British announcement would be followed by another decision to remove Hizbullah's military wing from the blacklist of terrorist groups, Wilks said: "Our policy is to stress Hizbullah's right to represent its electorates as a political party … The political wing of Hizbullah is of course part of the national unity government in Lebanon and the UK is doing everything possible to back this government."
Beirut, 06 Mar 09, 08:03

Churches Launch Charter for Political Conduct
Naharnet/A charter for political conduct under the teachings of the Church was launched Thursday in a joint initiative by Lebanese churches to regulate political life in Lebanon, which has "deviated" from its rightful path. The charter was launched in Beirut at the end of a conference hosting representatives of Lebanon's various churches and political factions. Former minister Roger Deeb told the conference that the document lists three commitments: to regulate ties between the government and the Palestinian authority in Lebanon; to ensure that all weapons are within state control; and to establish normal relations with Syria. Explaining the idea behind the charter, Bishop Beshara el Rai said: "Lebanese political life has deviated from its role" as a tool to serve the public. Therefore, there is a need to educate and guide (the political) conscience back to the right track."He added that the charter was "a gift of the spirit and was a result of the annual spiritual training carried out by the Maronite patriarch and the bishops." The charter described politics as "an honest form of art based on a set of principles and aimed to serve (the people)." It advised voters to "choose freely" the candidates who have a high sense of ethics and are most qualified to engage in political life. It cautioned against using "extremism" as a motivation when selecting candidates in the June 7 parliamentary elections. Addressing the candidates, the charter said parliamentary hopefuls must "be loyal to Lebanon, aware of the country's unique attributes and committed to preserving free decision-making." In addition, candidates must be supporters of democracy and human right and present "transparent" electoral programs. The document also called for the state and the Church to be "independent from one another."It also said both Christian and Muslim sects have a shared responsibility to preserve Lebanon's unique character and protect it from vanishing. Beirut, 05 Mar 09, 19:12

Aridi Visits Dahieh, Denies Link to Elections
Naharnet/Public Works and Transportation Minister Ghazi Aridi toured the southern suburbs on Thursday to inspect progress in the "Waad Project" to rebuild the area, which was devastated in the 2006 war. "I salute the residents of Dahieh for their steadfastness, patience and courage during the 2006 aggression," he said in a press conference. Aridi brushed off a question on whether the trip was linked to election campaigning since he was the first government official to visit the constructions sites. "The visit has been in the books for months. I have been touring all Lebanese regions and the media has been covering my activities," he said. "There is no electoral (agenda) behind any of the visits apart from the fact that I am voting for the best interest of the Lebanese citizen," Aridi added. Reminiscing on his memories in Dahieh, Aridi said: "I say, proudly, that my connection to this area is three decades old. I am connected to its people, its way of life, its men and its fighters." Aridi said he experienced some of the toughest days of his life in the suburbs. "The connection is unbreakable and rises over all political disputes." Beirut, 05 Mar 09, 18:10

Lebanese Builder Kidnapped in Nigeria
Naharnet/Armed militants have kidnapped a Lebanese man working on a road construction project in Nigeria's southwestern oil-producing state of Bayelsa, the military said on Thursday. The military spokesman for a special patrol unit in the restive oil Niger Delta, Colonel Rabe Abubakar, said in a statement that the Lebanese was seized Wednesday by "fully armed" individuals. Nigeria's oil-rich Niger Delta has seen a surge in kidnappings of local and expatriate workers in the past three years, mostly by criminal groups seeking ransom money. No group has claimed responsibility for the Lebanese man's abduction, only identified by his first name and his firm, Elite Construction Company. The most well equipped group militant in the Delta is the Movement for the Emancipation of the Niger Delta (MEND), which regularly attacks oil facilities. It claims to be fighting to give a greater share of the region's oil resources to local people. Unrest in the region has reduced Nigeria's daily oil production to some two million barrels, down from 2.6 million three years ago.(AFP) Beirut, 05 Mar 09, 19:25

Winner takes all in Lebanon? No thanks!
By Habib C. Malik
Friday, March 06, 2009/Daily Star
Of late, the majoritarian obsession has returned with a vengeance to Lebanon's pre-election political discourse. More than one political leader - Future movement leader Saad Hariri being the most recent - have declared the intention of the March 14 majority to govern alone should the results of Lebanon's upcoming parliamentary elections swing their way. In other words they have staked a claim to a post-electoral government monopoly on the basis of the principle of winner-takes-all.
In keeping with democratic practice, losers, of course, would be expected to fade into the background, where they could organize as a loyal opposition until the next elections. Hariri even stated that if his opponents won, he would do precisely that. No room here for a unity government; no veto power for an opposition; no coalitions born out of compromise; just raw majority rule, period.
Except that this is Lebanon we're talking about. Should March 14 decide to corner power if it wins a majority next June, it does not stand alone. The coalition has received constant encouragement in recent years from Saudi Arabia and the United States. Despite their current overtures to Syria, the Saudis still have an old bone to pick with Damascus, are trumpeting the Iranian threat, and are countering this by providing political and material support to bolster Sunni ascendancy in Lebanon. Washington, which insists on applying misplaced analogies with its own democracy, warns against Lebanon's turning into a "Hizbullahstan," and favors those it regards as "moderates," even if a post-election monopoly of power leads to a Lebanese implosion. Majority rule or bust, literally!
Interestingly, the discourse of the opposition is far more inclusive and conciliatory. An opposition win at the polls, its spokesmen say, would push them to seek a national-unity government with the losers (who would be accorded veto power), in order to cement mutual confidence and turn the page on the acrimony of last year, thereby preserving Lebanon.
Any cursory assessment of respective power configurations on both sides of the political divide would quickly dispel the notion that this mood of conciliation emanates from a sense of weakness on the part of the opposition, or anticipation on its part of impending defeat at the ballot box. Instead, one senses it might be the result of a deeper appreciation of Lebanon's nuances and fragile internal balances and delicate sectarian composition. It seems to emanate from a genuine desire to spare Lebanon further unnecessary tensions and distracting internal confrontations.
What about what happened last May in western Beirut and the mountains? A large portion of the electorate views what happened at the time not so much as an invasion, but rather as the painful yet necessary lancing of a stubborn boil in order to get on with the business of political compromise and power-sharing. If such a measured baptism of fire became unavoidable in order to break the stalemate and reach the Doha agreement - so the argument goes - then the elevation in the communal fears of some parties might have been a small price to pay.
In a composite polity like Lebanon, premised on the constitutionally recognized yet uneasy coexistence of 18 distinct religious communities, the most important fact about disparate sectarian groups is their deep-seated existential phobias. Pre-empting another May 2008 means that the first task of any emerging majority after elections should be to soothe and reassure the other minorities that it intends to include them in a power-sharing formula that would allay the latent fears hardwired into their psyches as a result of centuries of often bitter experiences.
This is unavoidable when it comes to Lebanon's makeup, which is why the country is not Switzerland, as Hizbullah's secretary general, Sayyed Hassan Nasrallah, has correctly stated. Attention to these primordial communal anxieties becomes imperative especially if an electoral win is counted as that of the Sunnis, or Sunni-dominated political factions. In that case, the concept of "majority" would immediately assume wider regional implications in people's minds, transcending the local political scene. Apparently, this basic reality about Lebanon is lost on Hariri. As for the so-called independents, or centrists, planning to run in the mainly Christian areas, they continue to suffer from a credibility problem that they are a smokescreen for March 14 penetration of those areas.
Perhaps Lebanon would be best served if the results of the parliamentary elections produced a near 50-50 split between the two broad political camps. In that way they will be compelled to work together to avoid perpetual paralysis. Political compromises, by their very nature, carry with them much dissembling, but absent the comprehensive acceptance of the only suitable formula for a divided society like Lebanon's - namely some sort of creative, constitutionally-grounded federalism - dishonest and temporary compromises will remain the reasonable course to follow. Political equilibrium must be sought whenever tensions threaten to turn nasty. Such equilibrium means not excluding genuine representatives of any of the major sects from the high-wire act of political balancing.
For their part, Westerners interested in Lebanon need to overcome their rigid definition of democracy as majorities in power and minorities in opposition. They also need to think outside the box in a Middle Eastern, particularly a Lebanese, context. In fact the Lebanese art of communal political compromise has worked well during times of extended calm and minimal external interference, and for this reason it can stake an authentic claim to being a respectable version of homespun democracy for mixed societies outside a strictly Western setting.
If political centrism, or the proverbial "third way," has any chance of coalescing in Lebanon, it will happen gradually and only after repeatedly frustrating experiments with equilibriums that produce gridlock. But for now such equilibriums, despite their infuriating inconclusiveness, are far safer for Lebanon. So, no clear-cut majorities of any kind please!
**Habib C. Malik is an associate professor of history at the Lebanese American University (Byblos campus). He wrote this commentary for THE DAILY STAR.

How Do We Reach Muslims who are Susceptible to Islamist Propaganda?
Dr. Sami Alrabaa
I think all of us, including Family Security Matters.org, the Front Page Magazine, Jihad Watch, Faith Freedom, Islam Watch, Europe News, Islamist Watch, Canada Free Press, South Asia Forum, The New Media Journal and all the others, are preaching to the converts.
Who reads what Daniel Pipes, Robert Spencer, Ali Sina, Nonie Darwish, Ayaan Hirsi Ali and the other anti-Islamists? From comments on articles by these writers, you can tell that it is predominantly readers who already agree with these writers.
According to a survey by Bielefeld University, Germany, which was conducted in five Arab countries, in 2008, the majority of Arabs – all of them adult Muslims of different occupations, education, and social classes – more than 80% of them consume Saudi and Qatari- owned international TV channels, like Al Jazeera, Al Arabiya, and MBC. Seven percent read Arabic newspapers, and only 2% checkout diverse websites. 186 of them check out once in a while articles by the aforementioned writers.
Hence, the mass of Muslims – the great majority of them are illiterate – are easy prey for Islamist chaplains, who preach hatred and violence against non-Muslims all over the Arab media.
If we are really interested in rooting out Islamism, which is spreading like an epidemic disease across the world, we must find ways to reach ordinary Muslims and gain their hearts and minds.
Many of those ordinary Muslims told a media research team from Bielefeld University, they would like to check out alternative media to the oil sheikhs’ outlets – TV and Internet – but there are almost none of those outlets are around.
The only Arabic Internet websites available at present are Al Hiwar Al Mutammaden (Modern Discussion) and Shabaket Al ‘Ilmanieen Al Arab (Web of Secular Arabs). Both are provided for and run by selfless volunteers, living on meager donations. “Modern Discussion” provides translation to its articles.
I checked out both and found them balanced and enlightening and pose a real alternative to Islamist propaganda.
As a sample, check out in “Modern Discussion” the articles of Kamil Al Najjar. He refutes many of Islamists’ allegations with quotations from the Koran and the Hadith.
From here, I appeal to all those who are interested in really fighting radical Islam to support the aforementioned websites and help creating as many like them as possible. Only such sites could help gaining the hearts and minds of ordinary Muslims before it is too late.
Arab liberal writers like Walid Phares and As’ad Abu Khaleel, who live and write in the West, and others could be a great asset to help limit the spread of the Islamist political virus, active the world over. Bilingual writers are needed.
In Bangladesh, where over 150 million Muslims live and where radical Islam is rapidly spreading, liberal enlightening publications like the Weekly Blitz can hardly survive. Such people need our concrete help, not just our rhetoric.
Dr. Richard Benkin, an American Jewish human rights activist, has been trying relentlessly to rally support for moderate Muslims in Bangladesh for years. He even affected the release of Salahuddin Shoaib Choudhury, editor in chief of the Weekly Blitz, a friend of Israel, and a liberal Muslim, from prison. But Dr. Benkin’s efforts remain a one-man show in a country which has suffered from Islamic terrorism more than any other.
If my appeal does not meet any positive response then my belief will be confirmed that we are not serious and interested in effectively fighting Islamism. Our English-medium sites are maybe outlets to vent our indignation toward a virus, but not to out root radical Islam, the core of the matter.
Only enlightening the Muslim masses would make the Islamist propaganda shrink and push it into the insignificance. Only then we can help creating tolerant moderate Muslim societies.
If we are unable to establish alternative TV channels to those owned by Saudi and Qatari tycoons, we should at least support Arabic outlets on the Internet, the medium of the future, which more and more Muslims are turning to.
I wrote to all those well-known anti-Islamists who live in the West about the above, but I hit deaf ears. They never bothered to respond. I have the impression that some anti-Islamists in the West have found in this area a kind of “business” and they hate to have “competition.”
We eventually need both the Western public and the Muslim public in support of the fight against radical Islam. I would even say that we need the Muslim support more because it is susceptible to consume Islamism and join its ranks, and there lies the real peril of Islamism.
**FamilySecurityMatters.org Contributing Editor Dr. Sami Alrabaa, an ex-Muslim, is a professor of Sociology and an Arab-Muslim culture specialist. Before moving to Germany he taught at Kuwait University, King Saud University, and Michigan State University. He also writes for the Jerusalem Post.

Taqiyya Revisited: A Response to the Critics
by Raymond Ibrahim
Jihad Watch
February 26, 2009
http://www.meforum.org/2094/taqiyya-revisited
Having written at length on various aspects of Islam, it is always my writings concerning doctrinal deceit that elicit (sometimes irate) responses. As such, the purpose of this article is to revisit the issue of deceit and taqiyya in Islam, and address the many ostensibly plausible rebuttals made by both Muslims and non-Muslims.
The earliest rebuttal I received appeared last year, days after I wrote an essay called "Islam's doctrines of deception" for the subscription-based Jane's Islamic Affairs Analyst. Due to the controversy it initiated among the intelligence community and abroad, the editors were quick to publish an apologetic counter-article by one Michael Ryan called "Interpreting Taqiyya."
For starters, Ryan is not a careful reader: he says I fail to mention ijma (consensus) among the ulema, even though I repeatedly cite and delineate the ulema's (quite consensual) verdicts supporting taqiyya; he sardonically suggests that, of course all people, not just Muslims, engage in deception during war—a point I stressed; and he evinces shock that I say Islam has no "common sense" and is "legalistic," when I simply wrote that sharia law is not based on common sense but rather the 7th century words of Muhammad, which may or may not rely on what we would today call "common sense." (I had in mind anecdotes of Muhammad saying camel urine heals, people should cover their mouths when yawning (lest Satan dive down their throat), men cannot wear gold, only silver, and in order to be in each other's company, women should "breast-feed" strange men ).
Next, Ryan makes the usual (and ultimately superficial) arguments without any backing: that I "cherry-picked citations from the Quran"; that I focused on a "very narrow use of the term taqiyya"; and that there are "other respected jurists who disagree" with the notion of taqiyya I stressed.
Unfortunately, he overlooks the fact that, right or wrong, none of this denies that there are Koranic references that do permit deception; that, even if there are "broader" definitions for taqiyya, the "narrow" one I delineated is still valid; and that if there are "respected jurists who disagree," there are still more who agree.
As expected, whereas I listed and quoted several authoritative jurists justifying taqiyya, Ryan makes only flat counter-assertions whose plausibility rests solely in the fact that they comport with the epistemology of the Western, secular reader, who cannot comprehend that a religion would actually mandate temporal conquests and permit deceit in their furtherance.
For instance, he makes comforting assertions such as "[I]t is manifestly not true that Muslims as a whole desire eternal warfare with non-Muslims," even though I never argue that Muslims desire eternal war but rather that sharia mandates it. Regarding a verse I cited as being relied on by the ulema in support of taqiyya (2:73), he writes, "To this reader, the verse inspires admiration rather than any other emotion." Odd that an article in a publication geared to the intelligence community and dedicated to analyzing Islam would bother evoking "emotions" in the first place—further revealing that Ryan's rebuttal relies more on "shared feelings," not facts.

Moreover, like most of Islam's apologists who are obsessed with portraying the "true-peaceful-and-tolerant" face of Islam, Ryan overlooks the pivotal fact that it matters very little if the entire Muslim world believes in jihad and deception. What matters is that some Muslims have, do, and always will. If 19 surreptitious jihadists managed to cause horrific deaths and destruction on 9/11, insisting that not all Muslims accept these doctrines is neither relevant nor reassuring.
Ryan next spends time making the argument that the word taqiyya "never appears in the Quran. The root in other forms appears in various contexts, but it never means dissimulation." As for taqiyya's cornerstone verse (3:28), Ryan, presuming the mantle of mufasir (exegete), and after quoting an English translation, writes: "The English 'guard against' is a translation of a verb that is taken from the same root as the word taqiyya but it has nothing to do linguistically with lying or deception [emphasis added]."
Absolutely true. But of course, all this overlooks the fact that the Koran is not the all-in-all in Islam; more important in determining right and wrong (i.e., in articulating sharia) are the hadith-derived sunna, and the indispensable tafsirs and ijma (exegeses and consensus) of the ulema. And these do use the word "taqiyya" and do define it as lying and deception.
Moreover, there is widespread consensus among the ulema. According to Imam Tabari, whose multi-volume exegesis is a standard reference work in the Islamic world, 3:28 means: "If you [Muslims] are under their [infidels'] authority, fearing for yourselves, behave loyally to them, with your tongue, while harboring inner animosity for them." Regarding 3:28, Ibn Kathir recommends the advice of Muhammad's companion: "Let us smile to the face of some people while our hearts curse them."
Perhaps Ryan thinks his non-Muslim, that is, infidel, exegesis of 3:28 will be more acceptable to the average Muslim than the exegeses of the pious Tabari, Ibn Kathir, and other ulema? And what "consensus" does he have in mind when the Muslim author of the authoritative Al Taqiyya Fi Al Islam asserts, "Practically every Islamic sect agrees to it [taqiyya] and practices it. We can go so far as to say that the practice of taqiyya is mainstream in Islam, and that those few sects not practicing it diverge from the mainstream"?
Ironically, and despite all the above, Ryan closes his article by saying
"It would be fundamentally incorrect to suggest that the strained positions of Osama bin Laden and other extremists somehow grow out of normal or mainstream Muslim thought: Al-Qaeda's deception does not grow out of valid religious duty. [Yet Muhammad said, "War is deceit."] If we fail to make the distinction between radical Islamists and valid, thoughtful and authoritative views of expert Muslim jurists, [apparently the many I delineated in my original essay don't count] we risk undermining one of the most promising tools to defeat radical thought. I am referring to recent successful programmes by the Saudis and Egyptians to persuade what the West might call radical jihadists that their extremist activities are actually against the canons of Islam as interpreted by mainstream jurists [emphasis added]."
What "successful programmes" have been initiated by the Saudis and Egyptians to de-radicalize Muslims? Is he referring to Saudi Arabia's rehabilitation through tennis, finger-paints, and GameBoys—which has by and large not been successful? And again, which "expert" and "mainstream" jurists is he talking about?
In short, Ryan's points crumble in face of the fact that, all philology, sophistry, and appeals to emotions aside, in mainstream Islam, what ultimately matters is how the ulema—especially the "mainstream jurists" he continues evoking—have understood and articulated the doctrine of taqiyya.
Regarding my more recent "War and Peace—and Deceit—in Islam," others have written to me complaining that, by not juxtaposing more "moderate interpretations" to the mainstream ones I delineated (e.g., Tabari, Ibn Kathir, al-Qurtubi, al-Razi, al-Arabi, et al), I am supposedly "distorting." While there are in fact "moderate interpretations," most of these come from minority sects—such as the Ahmadiyyas or the Quraniyuns—who, as they make up a trivial percentage of the Islamic world, and are in fact often accused of and persecuted for apostasy by mainstream Muslims, are definitely not representative of the latter.
Other critics express dismay as to how I can interpret certain verses as being supportive of taqiyya. Of course, being neither a Muslim nor one of the ulema, I hardly ever interpret this or that verse as being supportive of taqiyya/deception, but rather always attribute such exegeses to the appropriate jurist, scholar, or theologian—the ulema, who have the final say in mainstream Islam. (Ironically, being only a 4,000 word essay, I only supplied a tithe of the numerous albeit subtle taqiyya decrees and interpretations I have surveyed in Arabic texts dedicated to this topic.)
Still other critics point to strange English translations of the Koran that do not capture the actual meaning of the Arabic—definitely not the way the ulema understand it—in an effort to obfuscate the doctrine of taqiyya. For instance, some have written to me insisting that Koran 3:28 has "absolutely nothing" to do with deceit. As evidence, they quote the following translation from the website IslamUSA.org: "Let not the believers take the disbelievers for friends in preference to the believers unless you very carefully guard against evil from them."
The original Arabic says absolutely nothing about "guarding against evil from them." (Is IslamUSA.org practicing taqiyya in regard to ayat al-taqiyya, or the verse of taqiyya?) Instead, the original Arabic most literally says, "Let believers not take infidels for friends in place of the believers; whoever does this shall have nothing left with Allah—unless you but guard yourselves against them, taking precautions." In other words, it does not warn Muslims against befriending infidels due to the latter's proclivity for evil (which may contaminate Muslims who do not actively "guard" against it), but simply because they are infidels, non-Muslims—by default, the enemy. As for "guard[ing] yourselves" and "taking precautions," once again, however one wants to interpret these, the fact is, the ulema have already settled and interpreted it as aforementioned: deceit.
(Incidentally, is it not curious that while people are nitpicking about what the latter half of that verse means, no one seems to be interested in the far from ambiguous former half, where Muslims are simply commanded to not befriend non-Muslims in the first place? Is that not, in and of itself, demonstrative of Islam's position vis-à-vis the other, the infidel?)
Others have written to me, absolutely flabbergasted that I say Koran 4:29 or 2:195, which command Muslims to not "kill/destroy themselves," encourages taqiyya. For the record, I said no such thing; the ulema have—such as the classical exegete Fakhr al-Din al-Razi (see Tafsir al-Kabir, vol.10, p.98). According to him, since Muslims are commanded to not "destroy themselves," disclosing any truths that might lead to their destruction is forbidden. Thus a mujahid ("jihadist"), according to Razi, must conceal his identity, since infidels might "destroy" him if they were to discover what he was about. And so, in this sense, 4:29 and 2:195 do permit deception.
Others are scandalized that I wrote Allah himself is described in the Koran as being the best "deceiver" or "schemer." They write to me insisting that the Koran uses no such language (based on their trusty English translations), but rather portrays Allah as the best "planner" or "plotter"—the words used, for instance, in the widely quoted translations of Yusuf Ali and Shakir. So, who am I to ascribe the word "deceiver" or "schemer" to Allah?
Simple: in the original Arabic, the word translated (actually, euphemized) into English as "planner/plotter"—makar—most literally denotes (and, to Arabic ears, connotes) deception. Moreover, according to the definitive Hans Wehr Arabic-English dictionary, the trilateral root "m-k-r" means "to deceive, delude, cheat, dupe, gull, double-cross." One who takes on the attributes of "m-k-r"—such as Allah in the Koran—is described as "sly, crafty, wily, an impostor, a swindler." In colloquial Arabic, a makar is a sly trickster.
My reliance on one canonical hadith as supportive of deception has also come under fire: Muhammad said, "If I take an oath and later find something else better, I do what is better and break my oath." He also encouraged Muslims to do the same.
Many have written to me insisting that I "shamelessly" took these hadiths "out of context." For the record, then, here is the context: Some Muslims came to Muhammad requesting camel mounts to ride, but "he took an oath that he would not give us any mounts, and added, 'I have nothing to mount you on.'" Later, some mounts fell into the prophet's share of war plunder, and he gave these to the men. Overcome by altruism, one of the men reminded Muhammad of his oath to which the latter replied, "If I take an oath [to not give the men mounts] and later find something else better [the opportunity to give mounts presents itself], I do what is better and break my oath."
Now, if Muhammad swore he would not give mounts, but then when he was able to, he broke his oath ("to do what is better"), why should, say, jihadists fighting to make Allah's word supreme, after giving oaths to infidels (e.g., peace-treaties of sulh, truces, etc) not break their oaths when they too are able "to do what is better"? After all, what is "better": breaking an oath so some men can have camels to ride, or breaking an oath to make Islam—the embodiment of all good—supreme?
Once again, and whichever way one interprets this oath-breaking hadith, the fact remains: breaking truces with infidels has a long lineage in Islam. The authoritative Encyclopaedia of Islam, for example, simply states: "[T]here can be no question of genuine peace treaties [between Muslims and non-Muslims]… only truces, whose duration ought not, in principle, to exceed ten years, are authorized. But even such truces are precarious, inasmuch as they can, before they expire, be repudiated unilaterally should it appear more profitable for Islam to resume the conflict"—that is, if the opportunity to do "something better" presents itself.
In closing, it should be noted that the most revealing aspect of the recent, and atypical, barrage of disgruntled e-mails regarding my "War and Peace—and Deceit—in Islam," is that no Muslim (minus fringe Ahmadiyyas, etc.) has written to deny the more troubling aspects of the essay. For instance, while many nitpicked over the aforementioned, none have denied the fact that Muhammad permitted lying in certain situations, affirmed that "war is deceit," and permitted Muslims to deceive and assassinate infidels—all according to canonical (sahih) hadiths (hence the reason mainstream Muslims cannot refute them).
Moreover, the main point of my essay was not to demonstrate that Islam permits deceit during war—a phenomenon I indicated also prevails among many non-Muslim strategists as well—but to show that, for Islam, warfare with non-Muslims is eternal, "until all chaos ceases, and all religion belongs to Allah (Koran 8:39). Yet no one wrote denying this classical Islamic formulation of the world into Dar al-Harb and Dar al-Islam, which must be in perpetual war until the latter subsumes the former (except of course Michael Ryan, but he is simply another non-Muslim apologist).
Usually, silence is not necessarily indicative of assent; however, when large numbers of people take it upon themselves to criticize certain (minor) aspects of an argument, it seems reasonable to assume that their silence regarding the more revealing and problematic issues—such as perpetual jihad—is, in fact, implicit assent.

The Syria Temptation
And why President Obama must resist it.
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB123629205533144983.html
The Wall Street Journal 6/2/09

"Start with Syria." Thus did Aaron David Miller advise the incoming Obama administration on where its Mideast peacemaking priorities should lie. Mr. Miller, a former State Department official who first made a name for himself as a leading American negotiator in the Arab-Israeli peace processes of the 1990s, had lost his faith that a deal between Israel and the Palestinians was possible, at least in the near term. But he was more sanguine about the prospects of an Israeli-Syrian deal, and confident about the good that could come of it. As he put it in a Washington Post op-ed in November 2008:

Here there are two states at the table, rather than one state and a dysfunctional national movement. A quiet border, courtesy of Henry Kissinger's 1974 disengagement diplomacy, prevails. And there are fewer settlers on the Golan Heights and no megaton issues such as the status of Jerusalem to blow up the talks. Indeed the issues are straightforward—withdrawal [by Israel from the Golan Heights], peace, security and water—and the gaps are clear and ready to be bridged.
For a president looking for a way to buck up America's credibility, an Israeli-Syrian agreement offers a potential bonus. Such a deal would begin to realign the region's architecture in a way that serves broader U.S. interests. The White House would have to be patient. Syria won't walk away from a 30-year relationship with Iran; weaning the Syrians from Iran would have to occur gradually, requiring a major international effort to marshal economic and political support for Damascus. Still, an Israeli-Syrian peace treaty would confront Hamas, Hezbollah and Iran with tough choices and reduced options.


In making his case, Mr. Miller was putting some distance between himself and erstwhile Clinton administration colleagues, most of whom seem eager to restart the Israeli-Palestinian peace process where it left off eight years ago. But in his enthusiasm for an aggressive new effort by the new administration to engage Syria diplomatically—both directly and as an intermediary with Israel—Mr. Miller's views mesh perfectly with the segment of the U.S. foreign policy establishment that has the ear of the Obama administration.

And not just that segment. The "Syria track" has long been advocated by Republicans like former Secretary of State James Baker, who pushed the concept as part of the 2006 report of the Iraq Study Group. It was embraced, too, by Condoleezza Rice during her tenure at Foggy Bottom; she reversed the Bush administration's efforts to isolate Bashar al-Assad's regime by inviting it to participate in the November 2007 Annapolis Peace Conference. Even important voices in Israel agree. In May 2008, Prime Minister Ehud Olmert acknowledged that his government had been pursuing secret negotiations with Syria under Turkish auspices. "The renewal of negotiations with Syria after eight years of freeze is certainly exciting, but beyond that, it is a national duty that must be exploited," he told a Tel Aviv audience. "The years that passed since the [Israeli-Syrian] negotiations were frozen did no good to our security situation on our northern border, which is the main source of our concern for regional deterioration."

Say what you will about the advisability—either for Israel or the United States—of engaging the Syrians, the growing consensus on the notion constitutes one of the great surprises of recent Middle East diplomacy. For when it comes to the Syria track, the U.S. and Israel have walked down this road before, again and again, almost always with disappointing results. Then, too, it was just a few years ago that the Assad regime was almost universally in bad odor, not just in Israel, but on both sides of the political aisle in the U.S., and in much of the Arab world.

Cast your mind back to Ehud Barak's landslide victory over Benjamin Netanyahu in Israel's 1999 elections. At the time, Israel had been engaged in a diplomatic process with Syria for most of that decade, beginning with the 1991 Madrid peace conference, which Syria attended only reluctantly and which it did its utmost to spoil.

Two years later, just weeks before the signing of the September 1993 Oslo Accords, then-Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin made a secret overture to then-Syrian President Hafez al-Assad, offering to withdraw Israel fully from the Golan Heights, on terms and in ways roughly similar to those that had formed the basis of Israel's phased withdrawal from the Sinai and its peace with Egypt in the 1970s.

Assad replied by insisting that he would accept nothing less than Israel's rapid withdrawal to the boundary that existed between the two nations on June 4, 1967, before the start of the Six Day War. Those lines had never actually been drawn on any map. But were Israel to have implemented such a plan, Syrian sovereignty would have expanded by some 66 square kilometers beyond the now-recognized international border. In return, Assad offered Israel only minimal assurances on security.

Rabin's answer was to agree to the June 4 line, albeit with various conditions and assurances. This wasn't quite enough for Assad. As efforts at negotiation wore on and became increasingly tortured, Rabin, who had begun his peacemaking efforts with a relatively high opinion of Assad and a correspondingly low one of Yasser Arafat, changed his mind. "At least Arafat is prepared to do things that are difficult for him," Rabin told Dennis Ross, the Clinton administration's Middle East point man, in the summer of 1995. "Assad wants everything handed to him and he wants to do nothing for it."

After Rabin's assassination that November, Assad pointedly refused to offer condolences to his widow, Leah, despite U.S. pressure to do so. Still, Rabin's successor, Shimon Peres, remained eager for a deal, and even proposed flying to Damascus as a dramatic demonstration of the seriousness of his intent. Again, the Syrians demurred. Israeli and Syrian negotiators did meet extensively, if inconclusively, at the Wye River Plantation in Maryland in early 1996. But the negotiations were cut short by a string of devastating suicide bombings in Israel, carried out by Hamas and Palestinian Islamic Jihad, both of which are sponsored by Damascus.

A "Summit of Peacemakers" was held shortly thereafter to help shore up regional support for the peace process. Assad declined the invitation to attend. Later in the year, Mr. Netanyahu became prime minister and put the Syria track on ice for three years, though he did pursue contacts with Assad through private channels.

This, then, is where matters stood when Ehud Barak came to power in 1999, eager to pick up where the talks at Wye River had left off. Here is Mr. Ross, in his book "The Missing Peace" (2004), describing Mr. Barak's thinking on the subject, which closely resembles the case Aaron Miller would make almost a decade later:

Barak was also far more attracted to dealing with Hafez al-Assad than to dealing with Yasser Arafat. In his eyes, Assad was everything Arafat wasn't. He commanded a real state, with a real army, with thousands of tanks and hundreds of missiles; he was a tough enemy, but one who kept his word and was respected and feared by other leaders in the region.
Finally, Barak, like Yitzhak Rabin, saw a peace agreement with Syria as the best hedge against the threats coming down the road from Iran and Iraq. Insulating Israel from these countries, building a common regional coalition against them in the area, all depended on finding common cause with Syria.
Yet for all of Mr. Barak's eagerness to reach out to Syria, the Syrians were considerably less eager to reciprocate. Indeed, their first "overtures" to Mr. Barak consisted of a series of calculated snubs, beginning with the demand not only that Israel withdraw to the June 4 "line," but that it relinquish sovereignty over a portion of Lake Kinneret, the body of water also known as the Sea of Galilee. The lake, a critical component of Israel's freshwater supply, has always been legally recognized as sovereign Israeli territory, and the demand is one no Israeli government could possibly concede.

Next, Syria insisted that any negotiations at the "political level" be conducted with Mr. Barak himself, not his foreign minister, David Levy. Assad, however, would not represent Syria in person, but sent his foreign minister, Farouq al-Shara, instead. Incredibly, Mr. Barak agreed, despite the implicit insult and despite the disadvantage to which it put him in the negotiations. In Washington, at the first joint public appearance of Messrs. Barak and Shara, Mr. Barak spoke briefly and to the point about the "devotion that will be needed in order to begin this march, together with our Syrian partners, to make a different Middle East where nations are living side by side in peaceful relations and in mutual respect and good neighborliness."

With President Clinton looking on, Mr. Shara responded to Mr. Barak's politesse with a lengthy broadside against Israelis, whose concerns about security he depicted as a kind of psychological disorder stemming from "the existence of occupation," and with a lament that the international media had "totally ignored" Arab suffering. To cap it off, Mr. Shara refused publicly to shake Mr. Barak's hand. Mr. Clinton was aghast.

Predictably, things went downhill from there, when the negotiations moved a few weeks later from Washington to Shepherdstown, W.Va. Though much ink has been spilled (including by Mr. Ross) explaining the ways in which Mr. Barak's diplomatic tactics aggrieved or offended his Syrian counterparts at those talks, such criticisms seemed to reside in a universe in which only Syria's national pride and domestic political considerations needed to be taken into account. It is true that Mr. Barak was less than completely magnanimous in those negotiations, as Damascus bitterly complained. But Mr. Barak's hesitation was due largely to his political need not to appear to be giving away the store to a regime that had so conspicuously spurned him only two weeks before.

The Syrians could not have been unaware of the effect that its statements and behavior had on Israeli public opinion, and how that in turn would constrain Mr. Barak's room for political maneuver. Indeed, just weeks after the Shepherdstown failure, Mr. Shara delivered a speech to the Arab Writers Union in which he explained that Syria's interest in a negotiated settlement with Israel had nothing to do with actually coming to terms with Israel's right to exist, but rather that the recovery of the Golan Heights was merely a stage on the road to the destruction of Israel. Assad's government "believes that regaining the whole of Palestine is a long-term strategic goal that could not be implemented in one phase," said Mr. Shara. "[Our] doctrine draws a distinction between the different phases of the struggle for the liberation of Palestine."

Still, Mr. Barak pressed ahead. Despite growing Israeli skepticism about the wisdom of returning the Golan, Mr. Barak agreed to an offer in which Israel would relinquish the heights entirely, with only a narrow territorial buffer of about 500 meters to separate the Syrian border from the Sea of Galilee along its northeastern shore. Against the advice of his own generals, he decreed that Syrian military forces would not have to remain behind certain lines within Syria, as previous Israeli negotiating formulas demanded (and as Egypt had agreed to do by keeping its army out of the Sinai). What Mr. Barak asked for was a tiny, temporary presence of an Israeli monitoring team on Mount Hermon, along with some goodwill gestures from Syria. It was enough to persuade President Clinton that he could sell the deal personally to Assad.

This time, Assad decided not only to reject MR. Barak's proposal outright, but also to humiliate an American president for good measure. According to Mr. Ross, Mr. Clinton was prepared to spend a week in Geneva to mediate an Israeli-Syrian deal. Assad, however, would only give him a day. When informed that Mr. Barak was willing to settle on a "commonly agreed" border based on the June 4 line, Assad called that concession "a problem." As for the width of the proposed Israeli buffer, a question that had consumed countless hours of debate, deliberation, and creative thinking in previous rounds of negotiation, Assad disposed of the matter at once. "The lake," he told Clinton, "has always been our lake; it was never theirs."

The assertion of Syrian sovereignty over the Sea of Galilee was intended to derail the negotiations, and derail them it did. Assad died a few months later, in June 2000.

In reviewing this sorry history, one must ask: Why, exactly, did it fail so badly? Was the Syria track cursed by bad luck? Did its failure owe to problems of process and tactics? Or were the very premises of the negotiation—that Assad had made or would make a strategic choice for peace, that there was a deal to be reached on terms acceptable to him and to Israel, and that he and successors would abide by the deal—fundamentally mistaken? Was the peace "missed," as the title of Dennis Ross's memoir implies, or was there never any hope of one to begin with?

With Mr. Ross, one gets the impression he believes it was some kind of combination of bad luck and poor decision-making. If only Shimon Peres had won rather than narrowly lost the 1996 election, for example, Mr. Ross is sure a deal with Syria could have been reached. Similarly, if only an Israeli hadn't leaked certain details of the Shepherdstown meeting to the press, or if Mr. Barak hadn't kept a potential concession or two in his pocket, it might not have caused the mood in Damascus to sour. And so on.

If anything, though, the Clinton administration had nothing but good luck on its side. It inherited a uniquely auspicious set of historical circumstances when it came to office: Syria's loss of its Soviet patron, the precedent of the Madrid conference and the meeting there between Israelis and rejectionist Arabs for the first time in an international forum, the creation of the "peace process" as a mechanism of conciliation, and America's unrivaled prestige in the region in the immediate aftermath of the Gulf War. In Rabin, Peres, and Barak, the administration had three Israeli prime ministers prepared to give up the Golan very nearly in its entirety, and who demanded far less of Assad than Israel got from Anwar Sadat in the 1979 Sinai deal. And in men like Mr. Ross, the administration had dedicated and talented mediators who conducted skillful negotiations and won the trust of both sides.

No, the real problem lay in Syria, though exactly what that problem was, and is, remains much in dispute. According to Warren Christopher—another famous victim of a gratuitous insult by Assad, who in 1996 refused to grant the visiting U.S. secretary of state an audience—the Syrian leader was not opposed to a deal per se, but was undone by "his mistrust and suspicion of what was being offered." As Mr. Christopher told the Israeli newspaper Haaretz in 1997, Assad "examined [the Israeli offers] so extensively and exhaustively that he missed an opportunity. If he had been responsive and done the public things that we urged and also responded substantively, I think much more progress would have been done."

Assuming that had been true, one might have expected the Syrians would have reconsidered their methods, particularly during the three years when Mr. Netanyahu was in power, in order to seize on the opportunity presented to them by the 1999 election of Mr. Barak. Instead, Syria became even more inflexible—indicating that what Mr. Christopher saw as an excess of caution could as easily be interpreted as yet another instance in which Assad overplayed his hand.

A more plausible explanation comes from Patrick Seale, Assad's sympathetic biographer and a fierce critic of Israel. In a 1996 article in the Journal of Palestine Studies, he argued that no deal between Israel and Syria was ever likely to emerge, because each side had a different notion of what "peace" should achieve. For Israel, Mr. Seale believed, peace meant extending its influence throughout the region through nonmilitary means. For Assad, by contrast, it meant the opposite:

Comprehensive peace is not about normalization . . . but about holding the line against Israel . . . to shrink its influence to more modest and less aggressive proportions, which the Arab players in the Middle East could accept and live with.
Yet even this is too charitable to the Syrians. As Mr. Shara later indicated with his speech to the Arab Writers Union, Syria's long-term goals were not restricted simply to cutting the Jewish state down to size. Assad understood that Syria was unlikely to defeat Israel militarily. But that was no reason not to help set the stage for it, if not in his lifetime, then perhaps in his successor's.

Assad also understood that his interests did not lie in joining the ranks of international pariahs such as Libya's Moammar Gadhafi or Iraq's Saddam Hussein. But that meant only that he was prepared to make token gestures of cooperation with the West, such as attending the Madrid conference or bringing Israel and the U.S. along for his version of a "peace process."

On substance, though, his behavior was not so different from Gadhafi's or Saddam's. Like them, he sought to dominate his smaller neighbors militarily, as he did in Lebanon from the mid-1970s onward. Like them, he championed a secular version of Arab radicalism. Like them, too, he turned Damascus into a sponsor and host of various terrorist organizations, each of them at war with one of Syria's neighbors. Vis-à-vis Turkey, it was the Kurdish PKK of Abdullah Ocalan. Vis-à-vis Israel, it was groups such as the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (General Command), Palestinian Islamic Jihad and Hamas. Vis-à-vis Lebanon, it was a rotating list of militias, terrorist groups and assorted guns-for-hire, likely including Elie Hobeika, perpetrator of the infamous Sabra and Shatila massacres of 1982.

Syria is a dictatorship, and dictatorships typically need external enemies to furnish a gloss of domestic legitimacy to their rule. As a result, modern Syria has been a scourge of all of its neighbors, not just Israel but also Turkey, with which it nearly went to war in 1998; Jordan, which it invaded in 1970; Iraq, against which it supplied troops in the 1991 Gulf War; and Lebanon, which it has sought to dominate, either directly or indirectly, for many decades.

Assad's sense of himself as the anti-Sadat, the natural leader of the "rejectionist" front that would never come to terms with the legitimacy of Israel's existence, cannot be understood without reference to the peculiarities of Syria's domestic politics. His secular, Arabist Baath Party was naturally in competition with, and threatened by, Syria's powerful Muslim Brotherhood. Even if Assad had been so inclined, he could hardly allow himself to make concessions to Israel that the Brotherhood could credibly trumpet as a sellout of both Islamic and Syrian interests. That consideration was powerfully reinforced by Assad's religious identity as an Alawite, a group that makes up about 12% of Syria's population, is theologically closer to Shiism than to the country's predominant Sunnism, and is often considered heretical by orthodox Sunni clerics. Peace with Israel, in this calculus, risked the security not only of Assad's regime, but also, conceivably, of his own sect.

No wonder, then, that when Bashar, Assad's son and successor, was asked in March 2003 by a Lebanese newspaper whether Israel would ever be granted any kind of genuine recognition by Syria, his answer was categorical. "It is inconceivable," he said, "that Israel will become a legitimate state even if the peace process is implemented."

And then he offered this:

It should be known that Israel is based on treachery. This is a point to be considered thoroughly. We are dealing with treachery and threats, which accompanied the establishment of Israel. . . . It is the Israeli nature, and for that Israel was established.
Bashar Assad ascended to power almost immediately upon his father's death in June 2000. He was then not quite 35 years old, a doctor, trained as an ophthalmologist in Britain, with an attractive British-born wife who had previously worked as an international banker. Surely, it was said, the younger Mr. Assad would seek to modernize his country, liberalize its politics, and reach out to his neighbors. There were also predictions that he would not last long in office, that he lacked the toughness and the nerve of his father, and that the ruling establishment was merely biding its time until it could settle on a more suitable officeholder.

Neither prediction was borne out. In his first year in office, Mr. Assad allowed what came to be known as the "Damascus Spring." Courageous Syrian intellectuals emerged from obscure corners to call for political reform and democracy, and Mr. Assad himself pushed for the creation of a private banking system. By the end of 2001, however, many of those intellectuals were in jail, and today, the economy remains mainly in state hands.

Following these abortive moves toward liberalization, Mr. Assad tacked sharply in the opposite direction, staking out positions and making remarks that even his father might have considered excessively radical and needlessly provocative. At an appearance with the late Pope John Paul II in 2001, he accused Jews of trying "to kill the principle of religions with the same mentality they betrayed Jesus Christ." He told Colin Powell that Iraq was not exporting oil through a Syrian pipeline in violation of then-extant U.N. sanctions—a bald-faced lie to an American Secretary of State. He alienated Egypt by authorizing demonstrations against its embassy in Damascus and calling on it to go to war with Israel. He also upgraded his relationship with Hezbollah in Lebanon by meeting frequently with its leader, Hassan Nasrallah, something Mr. Assad's father had never done.

Then there was the matter of Mr. Assad's relationships with the members of the "Axis of Evil," from which Syria was charitably excluded by President Bush in his 2002 State of the Union Address. With Iraq, Mr. Assad abandoned his father's longstanding adversarial policy toward Saddam to call for an "Arab Defense Agreement" in which Arab countries would fight for their brethren in the event of an invasion. He supplied Saddam's retreating army with military equipment, including night-vision goggles and antitank weapons. Following Baghdad's liberation, he called openly for Iraqi "resistance" to the U.S. occupation, and facilitated it by allowing Syria to become the de facto headquarters of the Iraqi insurgency, as well as the way station for foreign jihadists crossing into Iraq.

As for Syria's fellow dynastic dictatorship, North Korea, its ties to Damascus are of long standing: Suspicions that Pyongyang was shipping Scud missiles to Syria date back at least to the early 1990's. What was striking about Bashar Assad's approach is that he publicly upgraded his military ties to Kim Jong-Il after the Bush administration had put the world on notice that it would punish regimes trafficking in weapons of mass destruction. In July 2002, the BBC reported that North Korea and Syria had signed "an agreement on scientific and technological cooperation." A second agreement, on "marine transport," was inked in May 2005. The real nature of these agreements did not go unnoticed: In September 2007, Israeli warplanes destroyed what is now almost universally acknowledged to have been a nuclear reactor, built on the North Korean model with North Korean help, in the deserts of eastern Syria.

Finally, there is Iran. Among the more common misperceptions feeding the hope of persuading Bashar Assad to make peace with Israel is the notion that Damascus's alliance with Tehran is primarily one of convenience and inherently unnatural, since one regime is Arab, secular, and primarily Sunni, while the other is Persian, theocratic, and Shiite. In this reading, Iran and Syria were first brought together mainly by a mutual loathing of Saddam Hussein, and a joint need to contain him. Following Iraq's liberation, the two countries were again brought together by the perceived threat from the United States. But, so this line of thinking goes, with America soon to exit Iraq, the alliance is bound to fray. "As soon as the United States leaves and all the powers are trying to figure out who's going to rule Iraq, and how, Syria is going to want Sunnis to have more power, Iran is going to want Shiites to have more power, and they're going to fall out over this," Josh Landis, a Syria expert at the University of Oklahoma, told National Public Radio in 2007.

The analysis here is incorrect in almost every respect. Yes, Syria and Iran shared an enemy in Saddam's Iraq and later in U.S.-occupied Iraq. But relations between Syria and Iran were frosty throughout most of the 1970s, despite Syria's equally frosty relations with Iraq. The elder Assad only really warmed to Iran after the Ayatollah Khomeini came to power, ended the shah's policy of close ties to the West (including Israel), and put Iran squarely in the anti-American and anti-Israel rejectionist camp.

Beyond Iraq, Syria and Iran also found common cause in Lebanon, where in the 1980s they joined forces against the U.S. and Israel and later sought to promote the fortunes of Hezbollah. Nor were the ostensible sectarian differences between Iran and Syria any bar to better relations, either, since the Assad regime is hardly less suspicious of Sunnis than is Tehran.

Indeed, the degree to which the younger Mr. Assad has cultivated his ties to Iran goes well beyond anything his father would likely have countenanced, if only out of innate Arab pride and an unwillingness completely to subordinate his interests to Tehran's. The two countries have signed dozens of commercial agreements, and Iran provides an estimated $1.5 billion in scarce foreign direct investment in Syria. Military ties have also deepened; the nuclear reactor destroyed by Israel is suspected to have been built with some form of Iranian participation. In 2007, Mr. Assad inaugurated an Iranian car factory in Syria with the remark that "I affirm, on this occasion, that the relations [between Syria and Iran] would not be shaken for any reason or under any circumstance."

The relationship between Syria and Iran, in other words, is in no danger of fraying. Rather, it has been deepening, and there is no reason to expect it will not continue to deepen.

The younger Mr. Assad has also deepened his relationship with Lebanon, a country he received as a de facto satrapy from his father, and which was crucial to Syria's economic well-being, its position against Israel, and its utility for Iran. The story of the relationship comes in two parts: First, of how Mr. Assad's brutality nearly lost him control over Lebanon; and second, of how his brutality served him to claw control back.

In the summer of 2004, Mr. Assad baldly decided to seek an extension of the term of Emile Lahoud, the nominal president of Lebanon and a Syrian puppet. He then demanded that Rafik Hariri, Lebanon's charismatic and independence-minded prime minister, go along with the decision. "This extension is to happen or else I will break Lebanon over your head," Assad reportedly told Hariri. "So you either do as you are told or we will get you and your family wherever they are."

Hariri's answer was to resign as prime minister, even as he vowed to deputy Syrian foreign minister Walid al-Moallem that Lebanon would "no longer" be ruled by Syria. Mr. Moallem, in turn, warned Hariri that he was "in a corner," and that he should "not take things lightly." On February 14, 2005, Hariri and 21 others were killed by a truck bomb carrying 2,200 pounds of explosives.

The assassination of Hariri provoked universal revulsion and was instantly blamed on Syria—a verdict amply confirmed by the preliminary reports of a UN investigation that is still ongoing. Mass demonstrations in Beirut, along with strong American, Saudi, and French pressure (Hariri had been a personal friend of then-French President Jacques Chirac), forced the exit of the 15,000 Syrian troops stationed in Lebanon. For a few brief months, Lebanon allowed itself to believe it was finally free.

Assad, however, wasn't done with Lebanon. Beginning that June, prominent Lebanese critics of Syria were killed and maimed, usually in their cars, by sophisticated methods. Syria's hand in these murders is also widely suspected. The clear goal of the killings was to paralyze the pro-Western government of Prime Minister Fuad Siniora, and it was achieved. By the following year, 2006, most of Mr. Siniora's political allies had either fled Lebanon or were living, in fear for their lives, in a heavily guarded Beirut hotel.

That same year, Damascus vied with Tehran for the honor of serving as Hezbollah's main cheerleader in the 2006 summer war with Israel. After the war, Syria distinguished itself by openly flouting the provisions of the cease-fire agreement (U.N. Security Council Resolution 1701) that called on governments to prevent the flow of arms to Hezbollah. In May 2007, a Sunni terrorist group called Fatah al-Islam opened fire on the Lebanese army and took refuge in a Palestinian refugee camp, forcing a months-long military confrontation that ended with a government victory. Once again, widespread Lebanese belief, backed by a persuasive body of evidence, points to Syrian sponsorship of the group.

Ultimately—and, in hindsight, amazingly—Syria salvaged its position in Lebanon after Hariri's assassination. The 2006 war in Lebanon served to enhance Hezbollah's prestige throughout much of the Arab world, and therefore the prestige of its state patrons. Last May, after the Lebanese government attempted to dismantle a Hezbollah telecommunications network at the Beirut airport, the group sent armed men into the streets to reverse the decision. It succeeded, at a price of more than 60 lives. Hezbollah also gained the right to a veto power over all government decisions, while helping to install a presidential successor to Emile Lahoud who was acceptable to Syria. The successor, former Lebanese army commander Michel Suleiman, explicitly called for closer ties to Syria in his inaugural address, and welcomed visits from Mr. Moallem, now Syria's foreign minister, and Manoucher Mottaki, Mr. Moallem's Iranian counterpart.

Thus it is that Syria, so promising to Aaron David Miller and others as an interlocutor for peace, has effectively installed one of the groups functioning as part of the existential threat to Israel as the dominating political force inside Israel's neighbor, Lebanon.

Future historians of the Middle East will no doubt ponder how it was that Mr. Assad, inexperienced and brazen, managed to provoke the U.S., outrage world opinion, lose his stranglehold on Lebanon, risk war with Israel, have his nuclear ambitions exposed—and then emerge from it all in a comparatively strong position, with both Israel and the U.S. knocking on his door and seeking rapprochement. Was it luck or was it skill?

One factor that plainly played a part was the incoherence of U.S. policy. The Bush administration had the reputation of being tough on Syria, and in some instances it was. In 2004, it imposed sanctions and engineered the passage of U.N. Security Council Resolution 1559, demanding the withdrawal of Syrian troops from Lebanon. After Hariri's assassination, the U.S. withdrew its ambassador from Damascus and later pushed for the creation of an independent U.N. tribunal to try the case. And in October 2008, it ordered a brief cross-border raid into eastern Syria to kill a leader of al Qaeda in Iraq who had taken refuge just across the border.

Yet the administration's bark was always worse than its bite. The sanctions President Bush imposed were the weakest among the menu of options mandated to him by the Syria Accountability Act, passed by Congress in the wake of the Iraq war and the discovery of Syria's active harboring of the anti-American insurgency. Indeed, the raid into Syria only happened after more than five years of collusion. After a strong start, the U.N. investigation into Hariri's murder has been left to drift; it is an open question whether the case will ever be brought to court. The U.S. never demanded serious enforcement of Resolution 1701, even when it was clear that Syria had violated it by helping to replenish Hezbollah's arsenal to levels exceeding its prewar strength. President Bush himself hailed the agreement that consolidated Hezbollah's grip on the Lebanese political process.

Underlying these moves was a profound ambivalence in Washington about the desirability of regime change in Syria, which, it was feared, a more direct confrontation with Damascus might produce. It didn't help that the most high-profile political challenge to the regime—the so-called National Salvation Front—was organized by a former top lieutenant of the elder Assad and included the participation of Syria's Muslim Brotherhood.

Prominent voices within the administration, particularly Colin Powell's, favored diplomatic demarches over military strikes as a way of altering Syrian behavior. The Central Intelligence Agency, grateful for whatever morsels of intelligence Syria might be willing to provide, was only too eager to preserve its relationship with the Assad regime. In 2007, Speaker Nancy Pelosi paid a visit to Damascus, for which she was sternly criticized by the White House. Nevertheless, Condoleezza Rice sought to engage Mr. Moallem in diplomatic parleys that led up to the Annapolis conference in 2007.

As for Israel, the notion that Mr. Assad can be steered toward a more conciliatory path remains an article of faith among ranking members of its intelligence community. They, in turn, exert a powerful influence not only on Israeli policy makers but also their American counterparts. After all, if Jerusalem feels comfortable making overtures to Damascus, why should Washington object?

Almost inevitably, then, the rejection of regime change as a policy option has pushed the U.S. back toward a bias for engagement—the notions of containment or ostracism apparently having been cast aside by a foreign-policy bureaucracy always hankering for the elusive breakthrough. Perhaps its most sophisticated proponent is Martin Indyk, a Clinton-era ambassador to Israel, who last year made the case in testimony to Congress.

To his credit, Mr. Indyk was quick to acknowledge that his experience in dealing with Syria "made [him] supremely conscious of the likelihood that the Syrian regime seeks a peace 'process' rather than an end to its conflict with Israel." Nevertheless, he believed that even a process that did not lead to an agreement could have its advantages. It could, he said, "spook" Iran and "generate tensions and frictions between Damascus and Tehran." It could put Hamas under greater pressure to moderate its activities, for fear of being abandoned by its Syrian patron. It could give the U.S. additional leverage over Syria, by which it could help shore up Lebanon's interests. And it could give Palestinians the "political cover" they need in the Arab world at large to resume their own negotiations with Israel.

Yet even as avid a peace processor as Mr. Indyk was forced to concede that the main reason Syria seemed prepared for negotiations was that "the Bush administration has managed through its policy of isolation to get Assad's attention." But if isolation was the key to bringing Mr. Assad to the table, how could the U.S. induce him to remain there once he no longer felt isolated? Then, too, as Mr. Indyk acknowledged, Mr. Assad's record as a negotiator was not a good one:

Just about every leader that has attempted to deal with President Bashar al-Assad has come away frustrated. The list includes Colin Powell, Tony Blair, Nicolas Sarkozy, Hosni Mubarak and Saudi Arabia's King Abdullah. The cause of their frustration is the disconnect between Mr. Assad's reasonableness in personal meetings and his regime's inability or unwillingness to follow through on understandings reached there. It is unclear whether this is because of a lack of will or a lack of ability to control the levers of power. Either way, it raises questions about the utility of a policy of engagement.

Despite these wise words of caution, Mr. Indyk concluded that engagement was "an idea worth testing by the next president." Testing it is precisely what the Obama administration now looks set to do. But implicit in Mr. Indyk's sober recommendation is the assumption that while success would have many upsides, failure would have no downside.

This is a dubious assumption at best.

Though the Clinton administration's Mideast forays are now remembered as a hallowed period of robust and engaged American diplomacy, their achievements were relatively meager: The only lasting peace to emerge from the various processes was the one between Israel and Jordan. And that particular agreement demanded hardly any process at all, but rather was the result of a strategic decision by King Hussein to which the Rabin government all but instantly acquiesced. Fundamentally, it was a gentlemen's agreement, and its success rested on the personal character of its leading decision makers.

Elsewhere, diplomacy proved to be an exercise in frustration and diminishing returns, purchased at a considerable cost to U.S. diplomatic capital and Israeli self-respect. By the time the elder Assad was through, he had succeeded in showing the back of his hand to an American president, his secretary of state and an Israeli prime minister, among others. He did this while pocketing the Israeli concession of the mythical June 4 line and accustoming Israeli leaders to the idea that a "peace" with him would involve no real grant of legitimacy to the Jewish state, no hard guarantees of security, and no dramatic regional realignments of the kind that would make his frigid peace worth having. And he did all this while maintaining active and not-so-clandestine relations with terrorist groups, from Hezbollah to Hamas, which he did little to rein in and occasionally unleashed as part of a self-serving Jekyll-and-Hyde routine. Even Yasser Arafat, who did occasionally jail members of Hamas, looks somewhat better in comparison.

Put simply, while the peace process expanded Hafez Assad's options, the same process reduced Israel's. That goes double for his son, who would enter into a peace process with his father's achievements as a baseline from which to seek further concessions. Mr. Indyk may believe that the mere resumption of a process without a serious expectation of a peace deal is some sort of achievement, but he fails to consider how it puts Mr. Assad in the enviable position of never having to engage that process with even minimal good faith. Which, in turn, amounts to an inducement for bad faith. How either the United States or Israel might benefit from this is a mystery.

Some of Mr. Indyk's other assumptions are also open to question. On Lebanon, it is noteworthy that he delivered his congressional testimony a few weeks before Hezbollah's de facto coup in Beirut. Any hope, therefore, that the U.S. could extract meaningful concessions regarding Lebanon from an Israeli-Syrian process has now been rendered moot.

As for Iran, it is by no means clear that Syrian engagement in a process would have any effect on the Tehran-Damascus alliance. Indeed, if the past five years of international negotiations over Iran's nuclear program are an indication, Tehran has learned that a sham interest in diplomacy is an excellent way to play for time and reap unreciprocated concessions without actually conceding on fundamentals. Why shouldn't it draw the same conclusion regarding the prospect of Syrian diplomacy with Israel? Tehran has no dearth of incentives to maintain close ties with Damascus. Syria is its bridge to the Arab world, particularly its clients in Gaza and Lebanon. Syria is also its ally against a nascent democracy in Iraq that seems increasingly unlikely to succumb to the threats of its neighbors.

Of course, there is always the chance that Mr. Assad might actually say yes to a deal with Israel that allows him to recover the Golan Heights. In that case, Israelis might thrill to pictures of a handful of their diplomats staffing a bunker-like embassy in Damascus, as they do in Cairo and Amman, and the Obama administration would also surely see it as a diplomatic triumph.

At the same time, however, it is easy to imagine a scenario in which an ostensibly "demilitarized" Golan, under Syrian sovereignty, is infiltrated by Hezbollah while Syria uses demilitarization either as an alibi to do nothing or as a pretext for the remilitarization of the area. If this seems far-fetched, note that Israel is now prepared to acquiesce to a large Egyptian troop presence in the Sinai in order to stop Hamas's weapons-smuggling into Gaza. By such or similar means, Syria really could transform a deal with Israel into yet another phase in its proclaimed "liberation of Palestine."

Such considerations all lead to a single conclusion: No "process" between Syria and Israel under U.S. auspices is currently worth having. The regime in Damascus has offered no indication that it is prepared to accept Israel's right to exist, or respect Lebanon's sovereignty, or abandon its links to terrorism or to Iran. Instead, for nearly two decades, Syria has offered only indications to the contrary, indications that have multiplied since Bashar Assad came to power almost nine years ago. For Israel to engage in such a process risks its status as a sovereign, self-respecting nation, one that is nobody's fool. And for the United States to do so risks the diminishment of its status as a serious power and a reliable ally.

***Mr. Stephens is a member of The Wall Street Journal's editorial board and author of the Global View column. This article appears in the March issue of Commentary.