Michael J Totten @ World Affairs Journal:
The Middle East taught me pessimism. Much of the region goes in circles instead of progressing, and I’ve seen one country after another circle the drain.
Optimism is very American. It’s not exclusively American, and of course we have our own setbacks and failures, but things have generally trended toward the better in American life since the nation was founded.
The Middle East, though, teaches another way of looking at history’s trajectory. My own naïve optimism was dashed on the rocks in Lebanon and Iraq and hasn’t recovered. I never even bothered with optimism in Egypt. There’s nothing there to be optimistic about.
And I rarely meet anybody who actually lives over there who isn’t a pessimist. Expecting the best while everyone around you is expecting the worst is a difficult thing to pull off. It probably isn’t advisable even to try.
But I’m finding a bit of homegrown optimism in some quarters of Lebanon now, despite the fact that the economy is on its back and the Syrian war threatens to blow the country to pieces again, and I’d be remiss if I didn’t report it. The place has a serious case of the jitters and everyone knows this summer will be the third bad one in a row, but the medium and long term might be a little bit better, at least for some.
Though not for Hezbollah. No, the medium and long term for Hezbollah looks bleaker than ever. That crowd still refuses to speak to me, but I did sit down and talk to three dissident members of Lebanon’s Shia community from which Hezbollah draws its support. They all think the so-called Party of God has begun its long journey downward.
“I’m optimistic,” said Nadim Koteich, whose political talk show on Future TV is one of the top-rated in the country.
“Really?” I said. “Can you explain that? Because I don’t meet many like you over here.”
“We’re approaching a turning point,” he said. “The problem for an organization like Hezbollah is that when it reaches the height of its power, it has no future. It’s all downhill from the top.”
The height of Hezbollah’s power—or its support, anyway—came on May 25 in the year 2000 when Israel withdrew its armed forces from South Lebanon, which it had occupied since the middle of Lebanon’s civil war in 1982. The Israelis invaded to demolish Yasser Arafat’s state-within-a-state along the border, which the Palestine Liberation Organization used to stage terrorist attacks against Israel, and the Israelis stayed there to ensure another group didn’t rise up in the PLO’s place.
It didn’t work out. Drunk on ambition and power, the revolutionary Islamic Republic regime in Iran, still fresh and new at the time, exported itself to Lebanon’s Bekaa Valley and the Israeli border area where a historically disenfranchised people had long been awaiting a savior.
