Sharmine Narwani, writing for The Huffington Post, talks to Hamas and Hezbollah leaders about their countries, US foreign policy, and TV programmes:
In early August and late October, I met with Hamas’ Osama Hamdan and Hezbollah’s Ammar Mousawi, chiefs of their respective organizations’ foreign relations portfolios….So where do things stand on rapprochement? What do they think of Obama? Do they have “hope” that US policy will “change?” What do they think of the peace process? Extremist groups in the Mideast – who are the worst offenders? Do they find inspiration in Americans and who might these figures be? Hamdan and Mousawi had plenty to say.
On Obama…
Ammar Mousawi: There is no doubt that we find certain traits that are distinguished in the character of Obama — that he is no repetition of former US presidents. When we listen to his speeches, we certainly note something new. However, the political forces that make policy in the US allow any exceptional steps to be only limited. There is no doubt that there is a change in tone, but it is doubtful that there will be a change in policy. If change were to take place, it would not be in Cairo University — it would have to be in the US Congress.
We know that Obama is experiencing political difficulties from his opponents. He is being besieged in domestic policy challenges and internal issues – healthcare reform, issues of his roots. So when he declared his ambitious approach for his solutions for the Mideast, they sent him the Israel lobby to put him in a corner. Read the rest of this entry »
I was going to write a follow-up on some of the ridiculous US-based analysis of Monday’s Lebanese elections. Thomas Friedman, for example, passed ludicrous and headed towards appalling in his Wednesday column in The New York Times, while that paper’s editorial board reduced the outcome to “a solid victory over Hezbollah…[and] a major setback for the militant group’s supporters in Iran and Syria”.
On second thought, however, best to be positive. I think this evaluation by Rami Khouri, written for Agence Global and Middle East Online, is outstanding, not only in its reading of the results but its attention to the near-future: “None of this really mattered much…because the balance of power in Lebanon (as in the entire Arab world) is not really anchored in parliament, but in power relations that are negotiated elsewhere.”
The Lessons of Lebanon’s Elections
We can draw many lessons from the Lebanese parliamentary elections Sunday, which saw the selection of a new parliament reflecting almost precisely the same distribution of seats among the country’s two main political groupings as the pervious parliament (68 seats for the Hariri-led March 14 movement, 57 seats for the Hizbullah-Michel Aoun-led March 8 group, and three independents). Here are my conclusions about what happened and what it means: Read the rest of this entry »
UPDATE — IT’S ABOUT (THE) US: For Michael Slackman of The New York Times, it’s not a question of Washington shaping the Lebanese outcome: “Political analysts…attribute it in part to President Obama’s campaign of outreach to the Arab and Muslim world.” You can slap the Obama model on top of any election to get the right result: “Lebanon’s election could be a harbinger of Friday’s presidential race in Iran, where a hard-line anti-American president, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, may be losing ground to his main moderate challenger, Mir Hussein Moussavi.”
Simon Tisdall, normally a shrewd observer of international affairs, trots out the same simplicities in The Guardian of London: “It’s possible that watching Iranians will be encouraged in their turn to go out and vote for reformist, west-friendly candidates in Friday’s presidential election. Lebanon may be just the beginning of the ‘Obama effect’.”
Juan Cole has posted a more thoughtful assessment, even as he opens with the reductionist and sensationalist declaration, “President Obama’s hopes for progress on the Arab-Israeli peace process would have been sunk if Hezbollah had won the Lebanese elections.”)
My immediate reaction to the results of Lebanon’s elections, in which a “March 14″ coalition of largely Sunni Muslim and Christian groups including Saad Hariri, the son of the slain former Prime Minister Rafik Hariri, maintained a Parliamentary majority (71 of 128 seats) over a “March 8″ coalition of largely Shia Muslim and Christian groups including Hezbollah?
Sharmine Narwani, writing for The Huffington Post, talks to Hamas and Hezbollah leaders about their countries, US foreign policy, and TV programmes:
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I was going to write a follow-up on some of the ridiculous US-based analysis of Monday’s Lebanese elections. 
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