Currently Reading 01/15/2010
From Baghdad to Beirut, by Michael Totten. Totten compares Iraq and Lebanon, the Arab world's two putative democracies. Money quote:
Iraq’s sectarian divisions, like those in Lebanon, attract outside powers. Many Sunni Arabs enlisted al-Qaida terrorists from 2004 to 2007 in their fight against the American military and the Shi’a-dominated central government, for instance. But no Middle Eastern country interferes simultaneously in Lebanon and Iraq as much as Iran. In 2008, Ryan Crocker—the American ambassador to Lebanon from 1990 to 1993 and to Iraq from 2007 to 2009—told Congress that Iran was pursuing a “Lebanonization strategy” in Iraq, “using the same techniques they used in Lebanon to co-opt elements of the local Shi’a community and use them as basically instruments of Iranian force.” In his new book, The Gamble, Pulitzer Prize–winning author Thomas Ricks elaborates: Crocker raised concerns about “what he termed the Lebanonization of Iraq—that is, the weakening of the government, the division of the people into sectarian groups, and the rise of militias that rival the government in reliable firepower.”
Iraq’s sectarian divisions, like those in Lebanon, attract outside powers. Many Sunni Arabs enlisted al-Qaida terrorists from 2004 to 2007 in their fight against the American military and the Shi’a-dominated central government, for instance. But no Middle Eastern country interferes simultaneously in Lebanon and Iraq as much as Iran. In 2008, Ryan Crocker—the American ambassador to Lebanon from 1990 to 1993 and to Iraq from 2007 to 2009—told Congress that Iran was pursuing a “Lebanonization strategy” in Iraq, “using the same techniques they used in Lebanon to co-opt elements of the local Shi’a community and use them as basically instruments of Iranian force.” In his new book, The Gamble, Pulitzer Prize–winning author Thomas Ricks elaborates: Crocker raised concerns about “what he termed the Lebanonization of Iraq—that is, the weakening of the government, the division of the people into sectarian groups, and the rise of militias that rival the government in reliable firepower.”
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