A rchive Date
[ 29-07-2006 ]
Category
[ International Relations ]
sub-Categoy
[ Lebanon ]
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[http://www.torontosun.com/News/Columnists/Mansur_Salim/2006/07/29/1708405.html
The lessons of history
By SALIM MANSUR
Sat, July 29, 2006
CONSTANTINE, ALGERIA - History is the consequence of consequences. Barbara Tuchman, the Pulitzer prize-winning historian, pointed out history might also be a "march of folly."
Fifty years ago this month, Gamal Abdel Nasser, the Egyptian dictator, unleashed a torrent of rhetoric in nationalizing the Suez Canal. The soldier-politician carried his country and Arabs beyond Egypt's borders on a tide of nationalist sentiment to the high noon of pan-Arab politics. A few months later, Nasser's rhetoric brought the tripartite response of Britain, France and Israel in the Suez War of October 1956.
Egypt was rescued from the humiliation of military defeat by U.S. President Dwight Eisenhower - a result of Cold War politics in a world then divided between Washington and Moscow. But Nasser learned very little from the episode of which he was the architect. Nasser remains the archetype of the Arab demagogue, despite his legacy of defeat.
Most Arabs recall Israel's stunning victory in the war of June 1967 - also provoked by Nasser's folly - as a catastrophe.
But for nearly 40 years and counting, the Egyptian tyrant's pale shadows - such as Iraq's Saddam Hussein, Libya's Moammar Khadaffy, Palestine's late Yasser Arafat, Syria's Assads (father and son), Algeria's late Houari Boumeddiene - have loomed large among Arabs as they suffered repeated self-inflicted disasters.
Nasser's progeny largely turned into Islamists, envied the cult of the Ayatollah Khomeini in Iran, and learned the rhetoric of mullahs (clerics) in order to provide demagogic legitimacy to the terrorism they adopted as a weapon of war against the civilized world.
This week, I visited the Algerian city of Constantine, named for the Roman emperor. Lebanon is a continent away, but the criminal folly of Hezbollah's Hassan Nasrallah - a petty warlord in the service of Iran's brutal clerical regime - in provoking Israel's retaliation is writ large across this North African state, which is still recovering from the madness of its own savage war of the past decade.
In Algeria, the military met the Islamist challenge with ruthless force. Some Algerians privately complain of military excesses in defeating terrorists, but the majority are relieved by an end to violence that turned Algeria into a killing field during the 1990s. Algeria's lesson is simple. There can be no negotiated settlement with terrorists. Any such effort only extends legitimacy to terrorists and erodes the civilized community's will to eliminate evil from its midst.
Lebanon's malaise for the past 30 years has been, quite simply, its failure to deal with demagogues and warlords. Its wounds are self-inflicted as it willingly became the staging ground for those waging war against Israel with impunity. Lebanon cannot be healed, or the Lebanese find release from demagogic warlords, unless it learns to apply Algeria's lesson.
The incapacity (or reluctance) of the Lebanese authorities to eliminate warlords within their borders has compelled Israel to punish Nasrallah and his thugs for their unforgiving provocations.
Now, any effort by Western democracies to appease this unreal world of Arab politics - for instance, by attempting to negotiate a diplomatic settlement - will only prolong Lebanon's agony.
All it will do, once again, is rescue another petty demagogue from the bloody consequences of his folly.
You can e-mail Salim Mansur at smansurca@yahoo.ca Have a letter for the editor? E-mail it to editor@tor.sunpub.com
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